Racquet sport players say self-calling and stacking lead to cheating

Junior Kalyani Narayan remembers playing one girl who continuously cheated at a NorCal tournament. There was a referee who stood there to make sure that the calls were right, but Narayan said the girl kept making bad calls.

With the pressures of being on a high school team sport, especially in racket sports, where individual matches count, students sometimes resort to underhanded methods in order to attain their goal.

“Cheating is inevitable, especially when so much pressure is put on the player to win,” Narayan said.

When players feel their opponent is cheating, they call other players to be line judges.

“There will always be someone who cheats, who doesn’t call lines, or who are just on and off about it,” Narayan said. “I see it all the time in high school tennis as well as in junior tennis. Self-calling is almost like a method for testing a person’s morality and honesty.”

Another way to play unfairly occurs when coaches decide to stack their lineups by putting better players in lower positions to secure easy wins.

“Ultimately, it’s the coach’s decision, so it’s not very preventable,” senior badminton player Lauren Chu said. “It’s also hard to prove whether a school stacked or not if the difference between the players aren’t that noticeable. Sometimes people would use excuses that they were injured that day too, so it’s hard to prevent it.”

Chu said the badminton team encounters stacking mostly with Cupertino and Monta Vista. According to Chu, since most schools knew how hard it was to beat last year’s No. 1 singles player Jeff Kuo, one of the best players in the nation for his age, they would give up their first position and place their best players in second.

“Cupertino stacked and they put all their leftovers into their doubles,” senior badminton player Derek Chao said. “The game was a complete waste of time, and they won due to strategic placement of their teams. I feel like it’s unfair, since you’re taking away good games from the better players that deserve the competition.”

Even though players and coaches know about the cheating in these sports, it’s tough to stop it from happening. People can only trust that others will be honest.

“It sucks to lose because the other school cheated,” Chu said. “It’s unfair, but there’s no way to completely stop it.”