ON THE TOWN:Unwritten law of sportsmanship

Last Monday, I watched the Estancia High School boys’ junior varsity water polo team play Santa Ana Valley High School at the Estancia pool.

Being a new spectator to water polo, I’m still learning some of the rules. In water polo, players can do almost anything below the surface of the water that they can get away with.

Above the water, however, the rules are pretty tight. As a result, there are two referees to maintain order and a lot of whistles being blown to indicate fouls.

But unlike other sports, where a foul whistle means stopping the game, players earn foul credits and get kicked out while the game is being played after they’ve accumulated enough of them.

At least, I think that’s how it works.

The other thing I’ve learned about water polo is what not to do. Unlike other sports, when the game is over and your son or daughter approaches you, you should not ask, “Do you want some water?”

At halftime of the Santa Ana Valley game, Estancia was leading by 10 goals. In water polo, that’s usually a “light’s out” game.

So coach Jennifer Broderick spent the halftime break teaching her team how to pass the ball while running the clock down so they would not run up the score and embarrass their opponent.

Broderick’s instruction was the right thing to do and the first time she has had to do it.

While Estancia perfected its ball-passing skills, Santa Ana Valley worked on its goal-scoring skills. Because they spent each possession playing “keep away” from their opponents, Estancia scored only two more goals in the second half and won 12-3.

Now we’ll fast forward to last Wednesday, and once again, we are at the Estancia pool.

This time, the team’s opponent is Laguna Beach High School. At the halftime of this game, however, Laguna is leading 15-1.

During this halftime break, Broderick is giving a different set of instructions, telling her team what they need to do to score and to play better defense.

At the other end of the pool, the Laguna coach is not telling his kids how to slow down.

When play resumed, Laguna kept shooting. They scored only half as many goals in the second half not because they did not try, but because the Estancia defense had improved. Throughout the second half, despite a lead that was never fewer than 15 goals, Laguna aggressively kept trying to score.

One of the reasons they continued to pound the Estancia team was that they had plenty of fresh horses to use. In a sport that is as physically demanding as any I have seen, Estancia fielded (pooled?) seven players, the number on a full team, while Laguna brought 16.

At the 20th goal, the parents, loudly clapped and cheered and seemed oblivious to what is an unwritten law in sports: You do not go out of your way to embarrass an opponent. It’s a lesson I learned early on as a participant in thousands of sports contests in baseball, basketball, football and more.

Trying to score as many goals as you can is no crime. It is the coach’s right to do so if he or she chooses. There is no penalty other than giving kids a lesson in poor sportsmanship.

At every level of play, however, most coaches know when to ease up; when to tell their horses to stop running and slow down to a trot. You see it in every sport in high school, in college and in the pros.

It is the job of any coach to help his or her team learn how to win. But winning has to be put into a context that allows players to understand every element of the game, including the human one.

Faced with the same decision in the same week, Broderick and her Laguna opponent chose different paths to victory. One was a class act, the other a sad fact.

I will not be confused with someone who does not care about winning. I am very competitive and I like to win. Winning is not only better than losing, it is more important.

And to many readers, this will appear as the rant of a sore loser.

But as a parent, given the choice, I’d rather my kid played on the team that showed more sportsmanship than one-upmanship.