for those of you who do not know, me and a couple friends coach my church's high school basketball team. most of them don't know most of the rules and 2 of them played for their high school teams. there is a league for upper new jersey/lower new york/connecticut areas and we are in it. my church is in spring valley and today we played the thugs from queens. in the beginining of the game we grabbed an early lead and held it till about half time. thats when the other team started to play dirty. the hired refs were sitting there dreaming and barely calling any fouls as half the team was getting injured and stabbed. now i reassured my team to not stoop to their level and to play smart, which they did. we stayed in the game until about 1 minute left when all hell broke loose. my point guard lost his temper and yelled to the ref to watch his man cause the kid was fouling him. the ref gave him a technical. the other team then took the tied us cause of that and got the ball on their side of the court. and one kid on their team (who was about a foot and 100pounds bigger then the next biggest kid on the court) grabbed my center, and pushed him to the ground. miraculously, the refs missed that even though all the fans jumped to their feet and started yelling. the refs then through the ball in play and the kid that pushed my kid grabbed the ball and scored another goal which gave them the lead and potentially won the game for them. i called a timeout and went and spoke to the other teams coach just as the kid asked me to do since he was absolutley furious. i told the coach that what happened wasn't right and the other coach laughed at me and told me its not his problem since the refs didnt call it. i responded with that this is a church league and its not right that he's condoning violence and foul play to church youth. he said yeah whatever and walked away while i was still talking to him. the refs said they cant call a foul they didnt see so i was out of luck. the kids got back on the court with 20 seconds left and went for the last shot. the ball got to one of our better shooters who in turn got layed out on the floor half way through the shot and the ball ended up out of bounds. game over.
the one kid that first got thrown to the ground got so agitated that he went and started screaming at both the ref and the coach. he got suspended for the next game. i went to the guy who runs the league and he said he would talk to the other coach (which he never did). i then took the kids outside and told them that life is all about keeping class and that getting even wasn't right and that we would be playing them again in a couple weeks so we can then beat them when we come more prepared (with better refs hopefully). then of course to top it off, the other coach, driving past in a van honked at my team laughing and drove past as i was talking to them.
the kids are absolutely distraught. they all had a big pool party planned after the game but they are so tired and beat up that they all just went home with their heads down. we have lost games before, sometimes we have been close to being shut out, but i've never seen them get so discouraged as today. just cause some jerk-off coach had to win and did so in such a grimey way. the worst feeling in the world is watching a group of kids be so upset
