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SPORTS

Referees no-show, Station Camp Middle forced to forfeit

Bison score 46 points in a half officiated by coaches, must take 1-0 loss

Chris Brooks
cbrooks@tennessean.com

Station Camp Middle’s football team was looking to use Tuesday’s game against visiting Portland East as a springboard after two tough losses in the first three games of the season.

Unfortunately, that did not happen, because no referees showed up to officiate the game. With the Bison serving as the home team and being responsible for the referees, Station Camp was forced to forfeit the contest.

“We had (officials) scheduled,” Station Camp head coach Daren Thomas said. “We did our due diligence, and there weren’t any referees assigned to our game. It’s (assigned) through a referee’s association. I don’t know (what happened). It’s awful.”

Both teams waited approximately 35 minutes past their originally-scheduled start time of 6:30 p.m. to attempt to find referees, but the decision was made to terminate the game just after 7 p.m.

“Here we were five minutes before kickoff and not a single (official) has shown up, so I thought ‘something’s not right,’” Portland East head coach Jake Judd said. “They don’t all come together. They usually each just come individually and you may have one running right at kickoff, but there’s at least enough there to get the game started.”

There wasn’t another day available to make up the game, according to Thomas.

“I asked Coach Judd if they could go (Wednesday), and he said that they couldn’t make it happen,” Thomas said.

The Panthers (1-3 overall, 1-1 Sumner County Conference Eastern Division) agreed to stick around and scrimmage the Bison for two quarters with each team’s coaches serving as officials. Station Camp led 46-0 before both sides elected to end the scrimmage.

“I hate to get (victories) that way, for sure,” Judd said. “But our kids were pretty pumped up when they announced that we won and we were still going to scrimmage them. (Station Camp) cleaned our clock and we didn’t even play two full quarters. We stopped with about two minutes left in the second quarter.”

Station Camp fell to 1-3 overall and 1-2 in division play with the loss, which damaged the Bison’s hopes of contending for the Eastern Division title.

“It’s just super disappointing as far as being able to tie or possibly win our division championship,” Thomas said, “because our kids haven’t been able to do that in several years.”

Thomas said all that his team can do now is put Tuesday’s events behind them and prepare for next week’s game against Hawkins.

“We really just have to move forward,” Thomas said. “There’s a lot of things that you can’t control, and the next thing that you can do is move forward. All I can do as a coach is teach them about life and adversity. I’m big about teaching life lessons.”

Reach Chris Brooks at cbrooks@tennessean.com or at 615-575-7118. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @CB_SumnerSports, and on Snapchat @cbrooksgne.

high school football