Douglas E. Abrams, J.D.

In 1989, Spike Lee earned an Academy Award nomination for his drama, "Do the Right Thing."  As Douglas E. Abrams writes in this month's installment of his series, Youth Sports Heroes, more than 20 years later, the command perfectly describes the noble split-second decisions made by three pairs of high school athletes and their coaches who set a standard of sportsmanship in following their best instincts to do what was right. 

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A 2010 Reuters News/Ipsos poll caused a stir by concluding that parents in the United States are the world's worst behaved parents at children's sports contests. Sixty percent of adults who attend kids' games have seen parents verbally or physically abuse coaches or officials, a higher percentage than in any of the 21 other nations polled.  Nationally-recognized youth sports expert and longtime coach, Douglas E. Abrams, believes the poll seriously distorts the state of youth sports in America.

On March 3, 2010, senior Rebecca Wong finished tenth in the Massachusetts state high school alpine skiing championships, the final medal position. Or so she and everyone else on the slopes thought. When Wong watched a film of her slalom run afterwards, she realized that she had missed a gate near the bottom of the course and should have been disqualified. Race officials had not seen the miss, and neither had any spectator. What happened next made Rebecca January's youth sports hero.

Varsity wrestler Reid Paswall had an idea. In November 2009, with the team's opening match only days away, he approached the Somers (NY) High School athletic director to suggest that the captains for the opener be two classmates who were not even team members. The two -- Adam Stein and Matthew Moriarty -- were special-needs students with Down syndrome. "I thought," Paswall  (in red singlet in photo) told the athletic director, "that we can have our special-needs kids go out and shake the other team's captain's hands, and . . . represent Somers."

On October 17, 1973, John McClamrock, a 17-year old junior at Hillcrest High School in Dallas, Texas broke his neck making a tackle.  Though her son was paralyzed from the neck down, unable to lie with his head elevated off a flat bed, or even sit in a wheel chair, his mother, Ann McClamrock, rejected suggestions that the family place him in a nursing home or other institution for quadriplegia victims. Instead she brought her son home and devoted the rest of her life to his daily care in his own bedroom.  Ann's greatest wish was that she would live at least one day longer than John so that he would never be without her care. 

Wanting to win is understandable. But in Doug Abrams' fourth annual countdown of top youth sports stories, five examples of exceptional sportsmanship involving disabled athletes confronting special challenges serve as a reminder to all of us that the final score is much less important than it seems.