A US high school girls basketball team is said to have proved “there are still good people in this world” after taking the unprecedented step of returning a championship it had won after realizing they had actually lost the title-clinching game.
The story stems from the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association, where a crucial scoreboard error early in the game gave the girls basketball team at Academy of Classical Christian Studies the edge over its Apache high school counterpart, as CBS News recently reported.
Academy coach Brendan King told the network: “As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said: ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not.’”
King went home that night and watched a recording of the game. He meticulously watched each play and recounted every basket – eventually discovering his team had actually lost.
The game ended with Academy, of Oklahoma City, winning 44-43 on a last-second shot. But King discovered the score was actually 43-42, with the opposing team from Apache High having actually outscored his team – and Academy being erroneously given more points than they had actually earned amid confusion about the scoreboard at one juncture of the game.
King’s team would have legally retained its championship had it stood pat on the result. The Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association rules say that once a game is finished, the score becomes permanent, and there is no way to change the outcome of a completed game.
But King approached his team to tell the players of his video review’s findings. And the players all unanimously decided to appeal their own victory with the association, asking for the other team to be recognized for their rightful win – and for them to be assigned a defeat in the game.
The appeal – described by CBS as having no precedent – succeeded. And King hand-delivered the championship plaque to Apache.
Apache’s head coach said she was glad to have won the title. But the coach, Amy Merriweather, also said Academy’s act of honesty and integrity meant more than the actual victory.
“It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”
Students from Academy also spoke with CBS. One student told the outlet that “it would have felt wrong, I think, to have taken the trophy, regardless”.
Another student from Academy said it was a “really good teaching moment” to establish that winning “is not the whole point”.
