Athletic Rules Are Made To Be ... Followed

In Uniform: Baltimore County Cross Country Championships

(Photo: Baltimore Sun)

This is a story getting some legs – about the Baltimore area high school cross country team that lost a championship because of a uniform rules violation involving Spandex undergarments.

In local and national newspaper sports and editorial pages, blogs and readers forums, debaters are asking when is a seemingly insignificant rule infraction worth distorting the outcome of the competition. A larger view is whether some rules should be overlooked to maintain the purity of competition.

On Oct. 26, a runner for Hereford High School's boys cross country team competing in the Baltimore County championships wore Spandex beneath his uniform shorts sporting a white pinstripe on the side instead of a solid color as a Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association uniform rule requires.

The rule says the undershorts have to be the same color as the uniform shorts. Six other runners at competing schools were disqualified as well. The rule was changed in Maryland over the past year to conform with a national governing body.

Hereford, a Mecca for cross country located along rolling hills and lush pastures in the hamlet of Parkton in far northern Baltimore County, won the championship. But not long afterward, the celebrating stopped. Meet officials bumped the superior Bulls team down to fourth place after the runner was disqualified for the wayward undergarment stripe.

Losing the county championship was a tough one for Hereford. They grow premier cross country runners at Hereford like daisies that sprout up in spring on the countryside. Since the agriscience school opened in 1954, the Bulls have won 12 boys state championships and five girls titles. The school’s annual "Bull Run" Cross Country Invitational attracts more than 100 schools along the East Coast, and the challenging Hereford course hosts the state cross country championships November 14.

So why punish a cross country powerhouse over an obscure stripe on compression shorts when it had the best team as born out by the competition? Simply, the Hereford runner broke the rule.

Indeed, rules are made to be broken, as the saying goes, but you get caught and you pay the piper. Rules keep the competition honest and keep the playing field level. They must always be applied evenly.

Hardly cross country, but consider some rules established by the Southern Maryland Invitational Livestock Expo and Horse Show held annually at fairgrounds in St. Mary’s County in southern Maryland. One says steers and heifers must be dehorned and healed. Another says dairy goats must have a collar. And still another requires that market lambs must be slick shorn.

So should you win the blue ribbon if your dairy goat comes in collar-less? While not knowing anything about livestock, the answer has to be a resounding "no." Where's the collar? Whether it makes sense or not, there is a reason for a collared dairy goat – whatever it is. Same with the Hereford runner. There is a reason for solid-color Spandex -- versus ones with a thin stripe or even tie-dye, Fergie screenshots or American flags.

Wearing Spandex under uniforms is a fairly recent phenomenon among athletes. Maryland officials noticed their proliferation and sought to standardize them with the actual uniforms.

In Amateur Athletic Union basketball, there is a rule that asserts uniforms cannot be adorned with logos or advertising of sponsors. Seems silly considering that a logo could support a cash-strapped amateur team with the cost of its uniforms. But it is the rule.

"Barely noticeable" beneath the Hereford runner's uniform is how one report described the infraction. On a reader's forum on the Baltimore Sun Website, one writer decried the lack of "common sense" in such rules. And there were suggestions that the team being elevated to champion after the disqualification should refuse the trophy. Nonsense, if they followed the rules.

Often times, officials running athletic events will overlook the rules, especially on uniforms. (You should see some of the rules violations that occur in AAU over uniforms, but teams and players still get to participate.) Rule violators will hit you with the "what difference does it make" consideration or that the "player will be hurt" if not allowed to participate.

The notion of following the rules, whatever they are, does not rise to the level of a teachable moment.

As a coach, parent or player, you just read the rule, inform your team and follow it. As an athletic official, you just enforce it.

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More: A look at Hereford cross country

Broken Record: Running Up the Score

Star QB: Maryland Arundel High's Billy Cosh

Photo: Arundelfootball.com

In high school football when is enough enough?

Same question for high school basketball and amateur sports. Same even for girls travel soccer.

It is a question for coaches, team managers, parents, sports administrators and others. Needless to say, it probably is a question being asked at sports fields and in gymnasiums everyday across the country.

On Friday night at a high school football game in Anne Arundel County, MD, the host Arundel Wildcats beat the Glen Burnie Gophers, 75-19. What is notable about the game is that Arundel’s star senior quarterback Billy Cosh threw seven touchdown passes. What is more, Cosh’s first TD pass 54 seconds into the game allowed him to tie the Maryland public school record of 80 career touchdown passes. Then at the 4:01 mark of the first quarter, Cosh broke the record.

Cosh, listed at 6-foot-2, 195-pounds and reportedly headed to Kansas State to play big-time college football, finished the night with his seven TDs completing 16 of 19 passes for 267 yards. He left the game shortly into the second quarter. Certainly, Cosh, the son of a college football coach, is a special talent coming out of a public high school.

Undefeated Arundel is the No. 1 rated team this week in the Baltimore Sun’s varsity football poll and No. 5 in the Washington Post. Glen Burnie is mired in scrubville.

Arundel is a large public school in Anne Arundel County -- about equidistant between Baltimore and Washington in the bedroom community of Gambrills adjacent to the Fort Meade military reservation. Unlike Glen Burnie in most years, Arundel is a sports powerhouse public school in the county and state, competitive nearly every year in several sports, including football, baseball and girls basketball.

But back to the question. When is enough enough?

What is the point of a 75-19 score in a high school football game? Why would a coach allow a top incoming college QB recruit to throw seven TD passes in a game against sorry Glen Burnie? Such questions deserve straight talk within the realm of high school, amateur and recreational sports.

One person posting to the Sun’s high school forum had this reaction: "I just have one question, why was he still throwing the ball honestly after 4 TD’s? He had already gotten the record! GB is really really bad, what was the coach trying to prove? Cosh should not have played after the 1st quarter!"

Sure, some teams are really good in sports and some are really bad. But on the high school, amateur and recreational level, aren’t we rooting for all the kids to compete well, succeed and have a positive experience? Can that occur in a 75-19 game? Doesn't it matter?

No one is saying Arundel should have rolled over in the face of a lightweight opponent. But don’t you just run the ball more after the first few easy touchdowns (Arundel led 40-7 at the end of the first quarter)?

Coaches will say you have to game-plan and execute no matter the opponent. They will say you do not want to develop bad habits and you just can’t let the other team score. They will say you are preparing for tougher opponents down the line. All true. It would send as bad a signal to players to play down to your opponent as seemingly running up the score.

Yet 75-19 scores happen much too often. Maybe Arundel’s coach had a bone to pick with Glen Burnie’s coach. Maybe the Glen Burnie coach did the same thing at one time or another. Or maybe he is just a prick who deserved such an outcome. Who knows what the history is.

Aimlessly running up scores happens on the amateur level as well, and it just doesn't feel right. In Amateur Athletic Union girls basketball, coaches will press 10- and 11-year-old girls relentlessly until they achieve a 50-point win. You know that "wonderful" 62-8 victory or similar in a game where everyone should be focused on teaching the fundamentals of the game.

And what about you, Arundel parents? Did you enjoy and encourage the shellacking, too? Parents do have responsibility as well to use their influences to keep things on an even keel, but it is doubtful they will.

In an under-11 girls’ travel soccer tournament Sunday in Dundalk, MD, a soccer dad could be heard admonishing his daughter's team to "don't let up now" – despite a 5-0 lead deep into the second half when the other team couldn’t get the ball across midfield all game and wouldn't possibly come back to win. (The final score was 8-0.)

Shouldn't it matter that the losing team of girls were competing just as hard. Should they have to hear rip-roaring applause from parents on the winning team at every easy goal scored as if their daughters were the next coming of Mia Hamm?

Let's root for all the kids. Let the kids compete. Let them enjoy the experience. Unlike record-breaking Billy Cosh, it ends with high school or sooner for the vast majority of them.

More: Arundel High School's football records page.

C. Vivian Stringer Well Deserving of Hall

It was a steamy June day outside. Inside, the temperature in the field house in Piscataway, NJ, was rising just as high on a half dozen basketball courts. The teen girl basketball players from Amateur Athletic Union teams along the East Coast were oblivious to the steely-eyed woman watching the box outs, crossover dribbles, off-hand lay-ups and defensive positioning. That woman watching intently was legendary coach C. Vivian Stringer.

Stringer, the head women’s basketball coach the past 14 seasons at Rutgers University, received basketball’s highest honor Friday night in Springfield, MA -- induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Stringer is part of an induction class with Michael Jordan and fellow NBA greats David Robinson and John Stockton and Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan that is being touted as the greatest in the hall’s 50-year history.

But on that late June day in 2008, Stringer was doing what she has done many, many times over a distinguished career, and that is watch – and nurture – young female ballers.

One of the teams competing at Stringer’s Rutgers weekend team shootout was the Maryland Hurricanes 15-under girls’ team out of Baltimore. AAU coaches bring their teams to tournaments like the Stringer shootout as part of a college exposure tour, intent on having girls experience different levels of competition from neighboring states while solidifying the credentials on their basketball resumes.

Stringer attracts some of the top Division I recruits in the country for her Scarlet Knights teams. The Hall of Famer is the only coach – men or women’s – to take three different programs to the NCAA Tournament Final Four in Cheyney State in 1982, Iowa in 1993 and Rutgers in 2000 and 2007. She has put up 825 career victories, third in Division I women's basketball history, and was the first African-American coach to reach 800 career wins in February 2008.

In women’s college basketball, mostly the tallest, hardest working and highly skilled players reach the free-ride status of a major Division I recruit. When a Candace Parker, formerly of Tennessee and now in the WNBA, or a Maya Moore with Connecticut, are 6-4 and 6-0, respectively -- and can handle the ball like a point guard -- you understand what makes an elite player. Despite what their wide-eyed parents might believe, most girl players on the AAU circuit simply are not at that level.

But that did not seem to matter to Coach Stringer. Throughout her tournament, you could see her watching, listening and praising the girls and teams that made the trek to Rutgers. While tournaments aren’t free, Stringer genuinely was interested to listen to the Hurricanes’ volunteer president’s 10-minute spiel about the organization, its players and its goals. Stringer understands full well the opportunities that can come to girls on the hardwood, if not D-1, then D-2 or D-3 or other women’s basketball associations.

In her induction speech, a humbled Stringer appropriately said: "As I walk into the Hall of Fame, we all walk into the Hall of Fame."

Stringer also knows there is giveback from her 39 years as a coach. One of her former great players, Lisa Long, is an AAU and high school coach in Baltimore, including coaching the Hurricanes team of girls born in 1998.

You hear about C. Vivian Stringer’s life and what she has overcome to endure as a coach: Born a coal miner's daughter in tiny Edenborn, PA … her only daughter being stricken with spinal meningitis in 1982 just before her team’s appearance in the first women’s Final Four … the sudden death of her husband, Bill, on Thanksgiving Day 1992 … fighting breast cancer … the media scrutiny of 2007 stemming from the disparaging remarks of radio-man Don Imus about her Rutgers team.

John Chaney, the former head coach at Temple University and a member of the Hall of Fame Class of 2001 who served as Stringer’s presenter, summed up her influence as transforming "hundreds of young women into confident leaders and role models, which will always remain an integral piece of her Hall of Fame legacy."

For the Maryland Hurricanes players and other girls lucky enough to compete at Stringer’s shootout, that is the point.

Editorial Note: Marvin Greene serves as volunteer president of the Maryland Hurricanes and attended the Stringer shootout in 2008. His daughter, now a 17-year-old freshman recruit at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, was the point guard for the Hurricanes team at the tournament.

• More: Maryland Hurricanes Girls AAU alumni list, C. Vivian Stringer camp Web site.

Photo: C. Vivian Stringer, http://scarletknights.com/basketball-women/coaches/stringer.html