One of the most tiresome, overblown issues in competitive sports is the notion that a coach deliberately "ran up the score" in a lopsided victory, and that he’s therefore some kind of sports pervert who doesn’t even deserve to be around kids.

I believe true instances of running up the score are extremely rare. In my experience on both ends of such games, the offending coach’s real motivation is much less sinister, such as: He just wanted to get his subs in and let them play competitively.

That assumes he had any motivation at all. Many coaches simply lose track of the score until someone reminds them that the game long ago lost its drama.

In the rare case when a coach does run up score on purpose, the losing team is almost always equally guilty of poor sportsmanship -- in the form of hypocrisy and hyper-exaggerated self pity.

Think about it. Suppose an opposing coach really is trying to pad his lead and make you and your team look bad. Does that make him a poor sport? Of course it does!  But why become a sniveling crybaby about it? Wouldn’t it send a stronger message to your fans and players if you congratulated him on how well his team played, and then you vowed to work harder in practice the following week?

Besides, at some point during the game, someone in your camp probably screamed at a referee for a call that went against your team, or shouted something less-than-complimentary to an opposing player.  That’s poor sportsmanship, too. Come out of your glass house, please.

Many sports organizations have "mercy rules" designed to prevent blowout losses. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference took this to an extreme in 2006, by passing a "blowout rule" that would suspend any football coach who won a game by more than 50 points.

But a more common rule is the perpetually running clock that kicks in when a team’s lead exceeds a certain margin.

These artificial esteem builders create a problem in their misguided attempts to solve one. Granted, they shorten the game and reduce the chance of further scoring by the winning team. But in so doing, they can make it impossible for the winning coach to give his substitutes meaningful playing time.

Speaking of substitutes … If they’re in the game when there’s still a significant amount of time left to play, there is simply no "running up the score" argument to be made. I don’t care how badly you lose. If a football or basketball coach, for example, has his second stringers in the game early in the fourth quarter, and he’s ahead by 30 points, he has a perfect right -- if not an obligation -- to let them play as hard and aggressively as if the game were still on the line. That means letting his young quarterbacks and receivers run pass plays (yes, even long ones … even on first down), and letting his young shooters fire away from the three-point arc.  This goes for whether you have your subs in or your starters.

Likewise, his opponent has an obligation to understand that this is not "running up the score." How else are these kids going to gain meaningful playing time? Why should they have to settle for a watered-down game experience just because the losing team can’t choke back its hurt feelings?

Besides, what’s so traumatic about losing a game by a lopsided margin, anyway? Unless the losing coaches and players are emotional cripples, the only thing they’ll remember a day after the game is that they lost. The score will be secondary. At least it should be.

I’ve endured my share of lopsided losses. So have my own kids and teams that I’ve coached. None of us were scarred for life. We weren’t even scarred for the rest of the evening.

When there’s lingering "trauma" from lopsided scores, it’s rarely because of the kids.  This is almost always an adult problem.  The defeated team’s coach and fans just … won’t … let … it … go. They whine and complain and write letters to the editor and call into local radio shows.  And the incident quickly takes on a life of its own.

If they’d just review the game the same way they did any other -- with an eye toward fixing what they did wrong and building on what they did right (however small that list may be) -- there would be little or no emotional turmoil.

But no. They have to drown in their own pity pool.

If you find yourself on the wrong end of a blowout loss and your opponent seems bent on making it worse, do yourself and competitive athletes everywhere a big favor: Keep your emotions in check and play the game, instead. And when it’s over, be the dignified sportsman that your opponent could never be.