Bad Behavior
Monday night my wife and I made the snowy drive down state to watch our nephew play basketball with his middle school team. It was a great game and he even scored a few points. I think where he really shined though was his defensive play and rebounding skills. He had to have pulled down double digits in rebounds which can really make the difference in a game. It was great to watch him play. His team ended up getting a decisive victory against one of their local rivals.
Unfortunately, the game was a little marred as two parents from the opposing team got kicked out of the game. They were standing near the sidelines making comments and eventually the official threw them out. The athletic director had to escort them out of the gym. Pretty embarrassing at the middle school level. The sad thing is, the kids of those parents will likely hear how they were in the right and how the game was stolen from them by bad officiating or other unfair means.
No apology, no owning up to your bad behavior, just excuses and petty justifications.
The funny thing is, the game wasn't even close, and I saw our players down on the floor after a rough hit more than I saw their players. I think they ended up winning something like 56 to 24. Like I said, not even close.
Sadly, during the game, I was also splitting my focus with trying to cancel our upcoming trip to North Carolina that I mentioned yesterday. The Radford softball team was supposed to open their season at a tournament Elon, North Carolina at Elon University.
We don't have any official word on why the tournament was suddenly cancelled. I'm guessing it was maybe the latest winter storm (Gianna? When did they start naming winter storms?). So anyway, with that tournament cancelled, UNC (North Carolina) decided to set their own schedule. Unfortunately, they somehow left Radford off the list. Whether this was intentional or not, who knows, but needless to say the Radford coaches weren't happy as now they are left scrambling trying to find other teams to play. Which will be a tough thing to do since most all schools likely have their schedules set. Like I said, I don't know if it was intentional or not, but this feels like a pretty classless move by UNC.
If the tournament at Elon was cancelled due to the weather, it doesn't surprise me too much. Elon is a much smaller university than UNC. With their power conference money behind them, North Carolina likely has much better facilities and a grounds crew that can dig them out from the winter storm.
We could have waited to see if Radford was able to schedule some other games, but with so much money on the line and all the logistics of traveling from Michigan to North Carolina, it wasn't something we were willing to gamble on. As I said in my other post, I was able to cancel all of our hotels, flights, and rental car with minimal loss to our budget.
Either way, it is still a huge disappointment. I asked our niece if she was more upset that she didn't get to play or that she didn't get to see us this weekend and she replied mostly because she wouldn't get to see us. I think that makes it even more heartbreaking!
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At least they got booted out which was the right thing to do. Only had one incident when refereeing and did the exact same thing by stopping the game until they left. There is no excuse for this and you are right those kids will think this is ok and why this needs to happen.
I didn't hear them myself, but my brother in law next to me said they had been chirping at the officials the whole game. By rule I think it should have been a technical foul on the team with two shots and our possession, but they didn't do that.