By Michael Letendre

In basketball, whether it’s at the scholastic or collegiate level, I’m absolutely done with the handshake line after games.

How many scholastic fights took place in Connecticut this year due to that end of game tradition?

One incident was too many as far as I’m concerned.

But that’s just the start of the story because there have been some truly ugly incidents collegiately as well with those handshake lines.

This past weekend, a women’s player from Memphis blasted a player from Bowling Green with a punch during the handshake line to end a playoff game.

This practice needs to end and frankly, the heck with sportsmanship after a game (why are all these fights in women’s basketball happening in the first place?).

I’m here to say it’s time to stop shaking hands at the completion of boys, girls, men’s, women’s and middle school basketball games.

This practice belongs nowhere near a scholastic basketball court.

After a heated 32-minutes of hardwood warfare, if you’re on the losing end of the pay window, do you want to shake an opponent’s hand and say, “hey, good game!”

Forget about it.

I’ve been witness to a fight after the handshake line back in 2011 when the Bristol Eastern boys basketball team traveled to Middletown.

The date was January 6 as the Lancers fell to the Blue Dragons 49-35 in a CCC South confrontation.

And I haven’t even gotten to the confrontation part of the story yet.

So, after the game as the teams were displaying sportsmanship with handshakes, a player from the Middletown team decided to whack Eastern’s Tyrell Holmes upside the head.

And after that display, the player from Middletown tried to run away from the senior.

No such luck as Holmes caught the kid, slammed the guy down to the court and a horribly ugly scene transpired.

I was there, covering the game for the Bristol Observer, as it was the first time Eastern had been involved in something that vile in quite some time.

As Holmes caught the opposing player, the stands began to empty, and fights broke out everywhere.

There wasn’t any security, school officials, or police to quell the situation.
And it was on…

The Eastern kids weren’t looking for confrontation (one player, who was attempting to earn his eligibility for the Lancers, had his back to the wall, defending himself against five people that jumped down from the stands).

The on-court warfare was as scary as scary could be, lasting 5-10 minutes, before Middletown Police finally showed up.

The fights ended, frankly, because the police brought in a K9 – a mean looking German Sheppard (I think he was drooling and ready to go) who helped restore order when he pranced onto the court.

It was so ridiculous, and I had to write up a follow-up story as the Middletown reporter sent to the game, who was hiding between the bleachers during the ruckus, spun the story – basically saying Eastern had started the fight.

There wasn’t any mention of the player from Middletown starting the brawl.

The story was an embarrassment and, truth be told, the author of that Middletown story didn’t like what I wrote in return.

But it wasn’t just the kids as the game was poorly officiated, there were two technical fouls called completely at the wrong time and that helped lead to all tension and violence after the game (one of the refs didn’t witness any of the fight, later stuck his nose into the gym asked what happened. A Bristol coach told him to ‘get lost’ in not so nice words).

I was mad about the follow-up to the end of game violence but that wasn’t the end of the story.

There was a rematch between the squads on February 4 and things got nasty online between some of the players as the game was looming.

It was decided that the players engaging online from each team would be suspended from the game and, due to safety concerns, the contest from the Thomas M. Monahan Gymnasium wouldn’t be played in front of any fans.

It was Eastern versus Middletown in an empty gym.

The game, won by Eastern (44-40), was as strange as strange can be and it was so silent at times that you could hear the ball falling through the hoop on every make.

Crazy was the term for it.

But if you were there to witness that event from 2011, and all the rest of the incidents from this past year around the state, enough is enough.

There was a fight in the handshake line between Bassick and Wilbur Cross High Schools on January 16 and right around the same time, Middletown was in the middle of it again as the program and Weaver started a fracas during the end of game ‘sportsmanship’ activities.

Let’s stop this silly practice at the completion of games and in part two of this issue, I will offer another yet another reason – from another sport – as to why end of game handshake lines needs to be the thing of the past and completely eliminated.

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