Sportsmanship making a comeback in church basketball

OGDEN — Badly bruised, but not beaten, sportsmanship is returning to LDS Church basketball and is playing an integral role in separating the winners from the losers.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints West Weber Region sports directors have introduced a sportsmanship scoring system that is reducing the number of technical fouls, while restoring quality to a game that has been the brunt of more LDS culture jokes than green Jell-O.

The directors, serving LDS stakes in Clinton, Roy and West Point, are now trying to take the sportsmanship program they adopted in 2007 churchwide. They introduced it in late March to other northern Utah LDS stakes at a multi-region church basketball tournament.

The West Weber Region is one of two regions in northern Utah to adopt a sportsmanship scoring system. The other region was Davis West, serving LDS wards in west Davis County.

"We are trying to expand (the sportsmanship scoring system) to more than our region," said West Weber Region sports director Lynn Thomas. "We have the attention of some of the other brethren in other regions."

Running a quality basketball program is in Thomas' blood. Since 1984 he has been involved in basketball as a high school referee and an employee of a San Diego city recreation program.

With the scoring system, referees and scorekeepers award teams a sportsmanship score ranging anywhere from zero to five points.

Points are awarded based on players demonstrating such acts as helping an opposing player up off the floor after a foul or not swearing or yelling at a referee.

The sports directors say they looked to late LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson for their inspiration.

"Sportsmanship is the spirituality in athletics and we believe that the church athletic program is a spiritual program. If it wasn't, we wouldn't continue it, because our purpose is to build men and women of character and spirituality," Benson is quoted as saying on an LDS Web site.

Scoreboard not all

With the system it is possible for a winning team on the scoreboard to be the losing team in the scorebook, if the quality of their play does not meet with church standards, Thomas said.

If both teams demonstrate the same level of sportsmanship, and no player receives a technical foul, the game is decided by the score.

Participants seem to be getting the message.

"We've come a long ways," Thomas said.

He said there was one occasion last year when the new scoring system changed the outcome of a region playoff game between two "senior" teams, consisting of players between the ages of 18 and 35.