By all means, play seriously against them — for say, the first half or so. But once you’re up, say 50-0 to nothing, it’s pretty clear to all involved that there is no “serious” chance of the other team winning the game. In that situation, it becomes obvious that one team so far outclasses the other that the situation is more like dunking on the six year old than the 96 Bulls blowing out the Wizards. And whereas the Bull and the Wizards are both (supposedly, anyway) comprised of highly talented, highly paid individuals competing in a league with a salary cap in place to ensure rough competative parity, the players in this instance were amatures, kids, competing in a small schools league, where wide disparities in amount of funds and size of talent pool between teams are commonplace. Whether the kids had learning disabilities has nothing to do with it.

p.s. at the end of the game. they didn’t reach 200
only because I elbowed the one player that was
going to shoot an make it… ;-)

http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/9-year-old-indian-beats-a-gm/

A few options:

* winners apologize to losers
* sack winning coach
* give ref power to end games prematurely
* add skunk rule
* remove losing team from league play

Since I’m coming from a designer’s viewpoint, adding a skunk rule is what I’d be interested in doing

He might have told them a number of things to propagate extreme competitiveness, considering there was clearly no reason to feel aggressively competitive or raise the performance to that level. I can see a situation in which He could have said, after realizing that it was a landslide, that “Girls, even though we will win, we lose in spirit if we get scored on just once.”

One solution to satisfy the conundrum: to let the players know that he was removing himself from running any “plays” or strategy; prevent the game to be a dummy “practice”, and let each player determine their level of sympathy towards the other school’s players. He could have told one of his players to be coach…

Also, why the comparison with musical chairs? there’s no score in musical chairs… no teams, no procedural strategy (first do this then that, iterate), etc. One kid game analogue to basketball is dodge ball, where simple social rules exist even in that maturity level (don’t throw at the face, big/slow kids awareness, fouls, stepping out of bounds, etc…), strategies, blocking, physicality…

Anyway, unless the media presents more details about all the things the coach did in the game to be I think that the situation isn’t so ambiguous considering the possibilities he could have done to play competitively and still let all players enjoy playing the game. He should be fired so his attitude towards winning can be better utilized by teams that solely behave in that competitive manner; History for consideration: Will Chaimberlan’s 100 point game, Bill Russell vs the rest, etc.

Jesper, I think the context of play is a very significant part of what kind of game you have, and also what ‘winning’ might mean. When you deliberately lose at musical chairs to some children, you are as it were, winning the larger game (investing in a relationship with your younger family members).

Consider this threat/promise: “If you get to level 5 on Ms. PacMan, I won’t kill you.” What kind of game would that be?

But also, has anyone here decided to deliberately lose a chess game because after a while you just got a bit bored with it. Are there similar ethics involved?

@Jesper’s response to Joshlee:
Clearly telling your opponent you don’t take them seriously is also unsportsmanlike. I see where you’re going with this–the point is to make the losing team believe the winners had to work for their victory. Or at least to let them pretend, maybe ascribe the outcome to luck rather than a gulf between their skill levels.

Contained within these expectations is the belief that losing is devastating (and, it seems, that winning is wonderful and more important than anything else). So ironically enough, because winning is so important, one shouldn’t try too hard to win. All this reaffirms the idea that losing is a terrible experience in the minds of the players.

And thus we are able to pretend there is no one significantly better than us at the game.