Florida State women's soccer coach Mark Krikorian - after deciding to leave seven of his starters at home during the ACC Tournament last week so they could rest up for the NCAA Tournament - was suspended for one game, fined $25,000 and forced to write a letter of apology to the other coaches and players in the ACC.
When I first heard the story and the punishment, I thought it was a blatant case of the ACC merely trying to protect a revenue stream - not necessarily from women's soccer, but from its entire slate of championship tournaments. The ACC's monetary goals are pretty well-established - after all, its teams are members of the BCS, the most blatant profit-driven cartel in all of sports. (All right, so maybe we're the annoying little brother of the BCS, but we're in it nevertheless.)
I was ready to write my first serious column excoriating the ACC commissioner and calling him out for blatantly protecting profits under the guise of defending "sportsmanship," and whatever other vaguely defined sports values he claimed to be preserving in doling out this punishment.
But then I interviewed Steve Swanson, the coach of the women's soccer team. While discussing his team's disappointing finish at the ACC Tournament, he said something that really struck me: "Our girls really wanted to win the tournament - that's a testament to them."
Several days before the tournament began, I remember asking the always-verbose Swanson - who regularly provides three-minute responses to 10-word questions - how he hoped his team would do. It was his shortest answer of the entire year: "We want to win it. Pretty simple."
Even junior forward Lauren Alwine - who seems to view talking to reporters as the equivalent of going to the dentist - lit up when asked about the team's goals: "We want the trophy."
Those four simple words reveal the true people at fault in this situation, along with the ones who should actually be writing the apology letter - the Florida State players.
They should never have allowed their coach to sit them for the ACC Tournament. They, like Alwine and the Cavaliers, should have told their coach, "We want to win." I can't think of any coach who, upon hearing that, would still bench his players for the tournament. Or at least any coach who plans on keeping his job.
Asking to play is what true champion athletes would do. You have to go into a season with the mindset that you can and will win every single game on your schedule; losses should only should only drive you to work harder. You can't say, "Realistically, I think I'd be happy with a 10-6 season and a wild card spot." You want to be 16-0. You need to have the desire to beat the living daylights out of your opponents - to have a yearning desire to prove, once and for all, that you're the best.
Michael Jordan - probably the greatest professional athlete of my lifetime - never took a game off, even in a long NBA season full of some really meaningless games. And not just because he knew people paid a lot of money to go see him play. At the root of it was the fact that he absolutely, fundamentally hated to lose.
If the Florida State players thought the ACC Tournament - featuring four of the top 10 teams in the nation and two-time defending national champion North Carolina - wasn't worth their time and effort, they're just showing why they've never won a national championship, ACC Tournament or ACC regular season championship.
At the end of the day, the Florida State coach was trying to protect his team.
What were those players trying to do?
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