Sportsmanship?

My daughter's high school volleyball teams played three road matches this evening at Barstow High School. The freshman team won a close match 2-1 with one of my eighth grade players from last year serving an ace in the last game to win the game and match.

The junior varsity easily won their match in two games.

Then it was time for the varsity match to start. Several of the parents and I figured out we were in for an interesting evening once the warm-ups started. The bleachers were only about 30% full so there were a lot of spaces to sit scattered all along the court. But that didn't stop about 12 Barstow students from deciding that they needed to sit next to us, and right in the middle of the section of bleachers where all our students had left their gym bags and homework. There was not a lot of unused space in this area to sit. But they moved right in and made themselves a home. In many cases these students had to sit with our students bags between their legs, under their feet and scattered all around them.

Both coaches asked us parents to keep an eye on the girls stuff since these students behavior seemed to indicate that they were doing this on purpose and were looking cause some mischief. So we tried to keep an eye on our players stuff and in the meantime most of the players left warm-ups and came up into the stands to move their stuff away from these interlopers.

Unfortunately we weren't sharp enough or didn't get things moved quickly enough. One of the girl's street shoes disappeared in this several minutes. We are hoping that nothing else disappeared out of their packs.

Then the game started. This group of 12 kids put on a display of bad sportsmanship that makes the Cleveland Browns Dogpound look like boy scouts.

I had my video camera running and it recorded almost an hour and a half of these kids teasing, jeering, and yelling crass comments at our players. It seems no one ever taught them the first rule of fan sportsmanship - cheer for your team, not against their opponents.

There was one guy in the group that liked to yell "Go Aztecs" as loud as he could but he only did it whenever one of our girls was attempting to spike or serve. But at least he was cheering for his team. The rest of group just basically performed down to the lowest level they could manage.

The only redeeming part of the night was how quiet these morons got, and how quickly they vacated the premises when my daughter's team won that final point in game five to finish off a 3-2 win in the match.

After the match I mentioned the rude behavior to a couple other parents and they told me that it is nothing new. Barstow High School has apparently had a reputation for years of having the rudest, most poorly behaved, students in the conference. One of the parents whispered that is why he has heard several folks refer to them as A$$hole High.

I asked if they thought I should send a copy of the DVD I had recorded to the principal so he could have a good listen to what kind of representatives of his school his students are. But most of the parents said it would be a waste of time. The school apparently doesn't care. I had to agree. In the last two years I have seen the Barstow varsity team play three times. In those three matches I have seen their head coach yellow carded for verbally berating a referee. She has thrown her clipboard, kicked her chair and stormed onto and around the court ranting and raving like a crazy woman. She had pretty much behaved a lot like the students who come to watch her team play. Since the school allows its coaches to behave like that I doubt they will care how the students behave.

Oh well, we are done with that team for this season.