In recent years, the Goose Creek High School varsity football team, a school located in an adjoining county, near Charleston, has become dominant in South Carolina high school football competition. Among the largest-schools-in-the-state classification, Goose Creek was last year’s state champion and was undefeated this season, while also being ranked as one of the premier teams in the nation.
But upon winning their first round playoff game, the Gators were disqualified for using an ineligible player during this year’s continued winning streak. Appeals to the state’s interscholastic athletics governing board, even a temporary court injunction which afforded the team another playoff win, along with an outpouring of community support–all was to no avail. Goose Creek was eliminated from further playoff competition and forced to forfeit all of their previous victories during the regular season.
Briefly, here’s the story.
A “special needs” foster child, who had bounced from institution to institution and family to family and had attended various high schools and in-home-school-programs in the state, was enrolled at Goose Creek High when Fall football practice began. He was offered an opportunity to be on the team.
Even though he rarely got to play in games, still his participation in practice sessions and the camaraderie of a school sport was meant to enhance his self-esteem by “including” him in a positive activity so essential to adolescent emotional and social development. Teenagers have to “belong” somewhere, and compared to “a gang,” most would consider a football team a constructive alternative.
Upon winning their first playoff game, however, Goose Creek High received some delayed paper work concerning this student which revealed that he was, apparently, in his fifth year of high school, which rendered him ineligible for athletic participation.
“Apparently,” because one of those years the youngster didn’t actually “attend” a public or private high school, but was instead enrolled in a specialized “at home” learning setting in a child-care institution.
Goose Creek High School immediately self-reported its discovery of the information they had received to South Carolina’s high school athletics governing board. Hence, the board’s decision to disqualify the Gators.
While the outcry of protest has been toward the “insensitivity” of the board–perhaps even several someones’ “envy” or “jelousy” of Goose Creek’s remarkable success–a less pejorative (more “scientific”?) understanding of their decision can be understood in terms of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). A widely used social psychology instrument employed in various settings, including management and human relations training in the workplace or the practice of individual, marriage and family counseling, the MBTI measures “temperament types.”
Of the various “types” revealed by the Myers-Briggs, the one most relevant to our state’s high school sports governing board’s decision, in this case, involves what the MBTI terms “STJs” (qualities of Sensing, Thinking and Judging, in contrast to a predominance of Intuition, Feeling and Perceiving).
If the Myers-Briggs is meant to be more “de-scriptive” than “pre-scriptive,” nonetheless, in Myers-Briggs-ese, “STJs” are characterized as literal, concrete thinkers who prefer facts over principles, details over exceptions. They like to make rules and protect them. In fact, “STJs” can become pretty anxious, even provoked, when they don’t know precisely where the “lines of authority” are drawn. Not only for themselves, but especially where others are concerned.
“STJs” aren’t typically known for either their creativity or their compassion, nor for much insight. And thinking “outside the box” is hardly something “STJs” are interested in; it is, rather, “the box” itself that “STJs” value. Since such definitive and exclusive enclosures serve as something of a “security blanket” for most “STJs.”
The notion of “ambiguity” (as in the “lesser of evils” or the “better of goods,” or that something can be both “good and bad” at the same time)–this is foreign to “STJs” who tend to be “dualistic thinkers,” living in a world of “absolutes,” with no “gray areas,” only “black or white/right or wrong.”
Among those whose egos seem to delight at serving on “boards”–of whatever kind, even one tasked with “policing” high school athletics–I’ve observed how often such folk tend to be “STJs,” people who not only thrive on being “right,” but seem to enjoy, as well, finding what is “wrong” with others.
Some might even claim that most “coaches,” in general–and “football coaches,” in particular–tend to be “STJs.” Since the best ones hardly “miss any details,” prefer “control,” and focus on “eliminating mistakes.”
Anymore than the Gators’ Coach Chuck Reedy would have played an “ineligible student” had that information been available thirteen games, plus pre-season practice, before he was made aware of it.
A former college coach, with a distinguished career, who has transformed a “losing culture,” where football was concerned at Goose Creek High, into a “culture of winning”–to his credit, Coach Reedy “erred,” if you will, on the side of being a public school educator whose “human-ness” offered a dis-advantaged youngster an opportunity to participate in something of value, an opportunity likely as important as the kid has ever been afforded in the difficult and challenging circumstances of his young life.
Not that the “STJs” on the athletics governing board of South Carolina’s public high schools would, or likely even could have seen it that way. Or as someone has said of “STJs”–they’re good at “missing the forest for the trees.”
As in Jesus’ sarcastic admonition: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees . . . who have neglected the weightier matters of the law . . . justice and mercy and faith . . . straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” (Matthew 23: 23-24).
[For a further, more extensive discussion of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, cf. my book, Balanced Living: Don’t Let Your Strength Become Your Weakness (Wipf and Stock, 2009), pp. 85-123.]
