Pursuit of Record Brings Sportsmanship Into Question
Coach Decides to Go for It Despite Lopsided Score

By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 6, 2006

Dave Hunt coaches football players so humiliated that they dread walking through the halls of Burch High School in West Virginia. Two of them thought about quitting last week. The rest considered starting a fight. "They want to get even," Hunt said, "because what happened to them is so unfair."

Yogi Kinder, the coach at rival Matewan High School, ignores his phone messages because he's tired of hearing strangers berate him for greed and selfishness. He's led a successful program for 20 years. Now colleagues call Kinder an embarrassment -- all because, he said, he wanted to do something nice for his senior captain. "I can't understand it," Kinder said. "You'd think we stomped on somebody's cat."

In a 64-0 win over Burch last week, Matewan running back Paul McCoy made a calculated assault on the national high school record for rushing yards in a game, amassing 658 yards and 10 touchdowns. McCoy and his coaches thought it would be fun for a small kid from a small school near the border of Kentucky and West Virginia to own the official, single-game rushing record.

But in the last week, Hunt and Kinder have learned that, in high school sports, individual records sometimes become a mark of infamy, not achievement. The two men -- once friends and co-workers at Burch -- refuse to speak to each other. Hunt says both his team's morale and the game's integrity were trampled in pursuit of a meaningless record; Kinder says records are sometimes worth pursuing, sportsmanship be damned.

Their argument -- one echoed in high school sports dozens of times each season -- has left both coaches pondering the same question: How important is an inscription typed in size-10 font that's buried in the middle of a record book?

"If you have 100 coaches, you have 100 different philosophies on how and when it's okay to break a record," said John Gillis, editor of the national high school sports record book. "There's no doubt that some of our records happened with a disregard of sportsmanship. We're judging the statistics, not the intent. It's up to the coaches to make the right decisions."

Last Friday night at Matewan, Kinder never so much made a decision as followed an impulse. He had always coached on intuition, guiding his team to a win in the 1993 state final while rarely looking at his playbook. He had an intuitive sense for the game, other coaches said, and it rarely betrayed him.

Kinder called a simple hand-off on the first play against Burch, and McCoy raced 69 yards for a touchdown. Three more basic running plays to McCoy yielded similar results in the first half -- scoring runs of 20, 52, and 56 yards -- and Matewan went into the locker room with the game in hand. McCoy had more than 300 yards rushing, and he guessed he would watch the second half from the sideline.

"I always come out in a blowout," McCoy said. "I was like, 'That was fun, but I guess my night's over.' "

Kinder had studied high school rushing records after McCoy ran for more than 500 yards in the season opener and, at halftime, he couldn't shake the official national rushing record -- 619 yards -- from his mind. A few weeks earlier, Matewan had been forced to forfeit two games for playing an ineligible player, a debilitating blow to the team's playoff chances and its morale. Now Kinder identified a panacea: He could lift his team's spirits and commemorate a great player, all at once.

Kinder had never coached a player like McCoy. The senior had unspectacular talent and minimal prospects of playing for a Division I college, but those realities never impeded his work ethic.

McCoy's parents grew up near Matewan, a mountain town of about 500 people located two hours from the nearest airport in Charleston. They owned a local barbeque restaurant, and McCoy had promised them he would somehow earn a college scholarship. At 5 feet 8 and about 160 pounds, McCoy could squat 500 pounds and bench 350. He had given up his dreams of playing running back in college and signed up to be a cornerback at summer football camps, hoping college recruiters would notice him at that position. They still said he was too small.

Maybe, Kinder thought, a national record would change their minds.

Early in the second half, the coach gathered his starting offense and asked a question that shocked them: How do you feel about going with a no-huddle offense? Do you want to go after this record for Paul?

"I've had kids that have had a lot of yards at halftime, and then we just kind of said, 'Well, he doesn't deserve this,' " Kinder said. "But with Paul, it was like, 'Hey, it's time for me to do this if it's ever going to be done.' I just brought the whole team over, and I looked at Paul and said, 'Let's go get it.' "

In the days that followed, other coaches criticized Kinder for showing such calculation. High school records should be the byproduct, not the purpose, of a stellar performance, they said. To that, Kinder gave each critic the same response: The days of carefree record-setting has passed.

In the last 25 years, the high school record book has ballooned from about 100 pages to almost 500. The intensifying competitiveness that has made over high school sports in recent years has also changed its record-keeping process. Gillis receives more than 300 record submissions each year, and he requires documented proof and a handful of signatures for each one. Records that have not been officially verified -- like a 739-yard rushing game in 1950 in New Jersey -- don't count.

Gillis includes a sportsmanship statement on each record submission form, reading in part: "Embarrassing an opponent for the primary purpose of inclusion in the record book is not consistent with the ideals of good sportsmanship." But inside the book, Gillis said, many records are founded on lopsided games.

"All these records aren't being broken in state championship games," Kinder said. "You get numbers like that against sorry teams."

Dave Hunt could accept the fact that Burch High School had a sorry team. The coach had expected as much after eight seniors graduated from last season's team and two more players transferred to Matewan. Hunt had approached 2006 with modest goals: to teach kids about football and build a nucleus for the future.

An embarrassing debacle that made national news was the last thing he needed.

Hunt knew Kinder well, since both men have taught classes at Burch recently, and he'd always regarded his rival coach as something of a local legend.

"He is a guy I always respected," Hunt said. "I never thought he would make me feel like this."

The coach felt confused when McCoy ran onto the field to start the second half. Livid when Matewan started to run a no-huddle offense in the third quarter with a 35-point lead. Nauseous when Matewan stopped returning punts, instead letting the ball roll backward to leave more yards for McCoy.

Hunt's team had lost its first four games of the season, and it hadn't scored against Matewan in seven years. But never had Burch suffered this sort of embarrassment. Midway through the fourth quarter, McCoy ran for a 77-yard touchdown that was negated because of a holding penalty. McCoy smiled, trotted back from the end zone to the line of scrimmage and, on the very next play, took another hand-off for an 87-yard score.

"It was kind of unbelievable to watch it happening," Hunt said. "With about six minutes left in the game, I heard one of their assistant coaches yell, 'One more should be enough!' And here I am, my team losing by like 60 points, and I'm thinking, 'One more was enough two hours ago.' "

Hunt paced the sideline and grappled with a brew of fury and humiliation. What could he do? How could he respond? Precedent suggested he could lash out. In 1990, when current WNBA star Lisa Leslie played for Morningside High School in Inglewood, Calif., she scored 101 points in the first half. The opposing coach -- trailing 102-24 and down to four girls after two of his six players fouled out -- forfeited before the third quarter.

When Epiphanny Prince scored a national-record 113 points in a basketball game for Murry Bergtraum High of New York against city foe Brandeis last season, Brandeis Coach Vera Springer briefly considered quitting. "It makes you physically sick," Springer said. "I'd rather lose 100 games than one game like that."

Hunt gathered his assistant coaches with about four minutes left in the game to form a response strategy, and together they watched McCoy run in a 25-yard touchdown to cement his record. Hunt pointed at about seven Matewan players, who screamed and danced in the end zone. "We have to do something about this," he said.

"I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of games each season where a record like this could happen, but it's just about who has the greed and selfishness to go out and do it," Hunt said. "It's not about who has the talent. It's about who has the greed and disrespect."

Before the clock ran out, Hunt called over one of his senior captains, Joshua Croaff, and asked the linebacker if he thought the two teams should keep with precedent and shake hands at the end of the game. "The only way I'm shaking their hands," Croaff said, "is if I'm wearing a handcuff."

When the game ended, Matewan players walked to midfield expecting to cordially shake hands with a bunch of kids who lived 10 miles down the road. Standing on the visiting sidelines, Croaff hesitated for a second, as if deciding whether or not to meet his opponents. Then he turned in the opposite direction, motioning for his teammates to follow. Burch players jogged directly to the locker room, leaving behind a field where two things had been broken: a record and a tradition.