An Unfair Penalty

Speaking of his stunning Best Picture-winning film “Parasite,” writer and director Bong Joon Ho has called it “a tragedy without villains.” It’s a shorthand way to describe the disastrous situation involving the Southampton girls basketball team, which will miss the Class B postseason despite a 10-6 League VII record.

Section XI, the governing body of high school sports in Suffolk County, deemed the team ineligible because it had played one more than the maximum of 20 games this season. The team ended up playing a fifth non-league game solely because head coach Richard “Juni” Wingfield had been trying to help a coaching colleague and to pay tribute to a coaching mentor in a pair of games, and seems to simply have lost track of the numbers.

Finger-pointing is useless. Certainly, Mr. Wingfield and Athletic Director Darren Phillips should have caught the matter — but they made a mistake. Section XI can’t be expected to monitor such situations, nor to ignore a violation of a clear rule.

However, it’s worth noting that, after the Center Moriches girls soccer team had a similar infraction in 2017, it was generally expected that Section XI would create some type of alert on its scheduling platform so that similar mistakes would be flagged and avoided. Never happened.

Credit Mr. Wingfield for calling on Section XI to punish him or the district, not his team. The girls, after all, are the only truly innocent victims — and they’re the ones paying the highest price, especially four seniors, Caraline Oakley, Allysha Thomas, Reilly Zorko and Ishanti Gumbs. They played a key role in getting this program to playoff caliber. Now they’ll have to wonder, for the rest of their lives, if they could have beaten Port Jefferson or Mattituck for a Suffolk County title, and maybe taken a trip upstate.

It’s not the first time adults have let down kids, even while trying to keep them safe and healthy. But there are two lessons to take away here. First, it’s unfair to punish players for a violation they had no control over; none of the players was consulted about the schedule they play. Now that Section XI can see that it might happen on occasion — this is twice in three years — it’s past time to develop a way to sanction programs, not individual players and teams. The punishment simply does not fit the crime.

And, sure, the coach and AD are ultimately at fault, but it’s perfectly sensible that Section XI should have a “red flag” for teams that might be violating a scheduling rule. The price being paid by these girls is far too high for other, older people’s inability to put a working system in place. They’re not villains, but this is still a tragedy, one to be avoided, if possible, in the future.