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Serving the scholastic field hockey and lacrosse community since 1998Archive for February 27, 2022
Feb. 27, 2022 — The annual question
The Twitterverse was thrown into a tizzy this weekend because of a final score in a men’s lacrosse game between the club teams representing the College of Idaho and Southern Oregon University.
The result: Idaho beat Southern Oregon 42-2.
There’s been a lot said about this game that has, frankly, been said on numerous occasions when there has been an imbalance in scores. Should the team with the big lead have taken their foot off the gas? If so, by how much? Are there ways that the players could handicap themselves (playing with their off-hand, for example) so that the margin wasn’t so large?
Ultimately, should the people in charge of a particular sport step in with either a mercy rule ending a game when a margin gets to a certain mark? Or should coaches be penalized for running up the score?
And I’ve seen 29-0 scores in field hockey and 33-0 in girls’ lacrosse.
I have seen individuals have been able to put up record numbers in both field hockey and lacrosse. And the teams which have had these high-scorers in their lineups have been successful, both on the high-school, club, and even the college levels.
To try to curtail these players and teams, I have also seen all kinds of regulations, from letters of reprimand threatened for coaches who win by too large a margin to the end of contests called when the scoring margin is too much.
I’ve never been one for these kinds of interventions. Instead, I think it is up to the team that lost the game to figure out what to do better, and learn from the experience, and not let someone else try to regulate the game.
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