What to say now, with the Skaneateles football saga at an end?
A 9-0 team, proud of its accomplishments, is sidelined through the faults and transgressions of others.
There’s no need to rehash every detail again. Instead, it might be healthy to explore the roots of why such a thing happens. And it all traces back to an uncomfortable truth of our society – that the desire to win, at anything, is so intoxicating and tempting that it leads good people into doing bad things.
The pop culture, of course, reinforces this message. Take the opening scene of Patton, the gigantic flag, George S. Patton telling his troops that “Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time.”
Or that humorous scene in The Natural when, in the midst of the New York Knights’ losing ways, a “two-bit carnie hypnotist” drones that “losing is a disease, as contagious as” polio, syphilis or other dreaded maladies of the time.
One does not need to go to the movies, though, to have this message seared into our skulls. Just look at elections, and the world of attack ads on TV and attack flyers that show up on your mailbox, anything to pick up a few more votes.
Or look at business, where getting ahead means any means necessary. Recently, there was a story in Florida where two managers at a Domino’s Pizza were charged with burning down a nearby Papa John’s store, all to gain more customers and take away a rival. You have to win, right?
Now take those examples, and apply them to high school sports. The desire to win is so complete and overwhelming that it rivals, and sometimes tops, what goes on in the pro and college ranks, and we’re all parties to that reality.
Teams practice, and then they play contests against each other on the field and on the courts. We keep score. Someone wins, someone loses, and then we publicize those results, heaping glory upon the victors and, sometimes, scorn upon the vanquished.
The pressure to win, to get ahead, affects every party. Players and their coaches push hard, sometimes more than they should. Parents join in, too, never seeing anything wrong in their kids and, when their team gets beat, point the finger at anyone else, especially officials, who supposedly did them wrong. So much for learning about responsibility.
That, in essence, is what happened with Skaneateles football. The Lakers had lost for a long time, and in some cases struggled just to be competitive. They wanted to win, and now, and went all-out to do so. In the course of events, rules were broken.
To spend a lot of time pointing fingers is, in the end, pointless. It doesn’t change the facts or results, and won’t make the players (who were all ruled eligible) feel any better, even if it’s easier to fine someone, or something, to blame.
In all the years that I’ve spent covering high school sports, I’ve found one consistent truth – that the kids want to win, but can handle defeat with far more grace than their adult counterparts.
Oh sure, there is frustration, and sometimes there are tears, when a championship opportunity slips away. But those sad feelings are short-lived, and life continues, and there is little, if any, finger-pointing once the cheers fade away.
The Skaneateles football case drew more attention to high school sports in Central New York than anything in a long time, stirring passions on all sides of the argument. Since the narrative centered on the downfall of a famous name, we got the usual trend toward sensationalism and away from finding the whole truth, because that was too complicated.
Worse yet, this happened as other Section III teams in other sports worked their way toward championships. Outside of outlets like ours, almost no attention was paid to other teams, or other sports, where students and coaches alike do boring things like compete without scandal.
Many will quibble with what Section III did here, saying that it went too far and punished kids who, based on all the available evidence, were eligible to compete. But they made a necessary decision, knowing it would not be popular, and while doing so made it very clear that they did not want to do this.
For that, they should be commended for their courage. In a society that puts an inordinate amount of emphasis on winning, and finding ways to win, Section III decided that rules came first, a lesson that was quite painful to absorb, but still necessary.
