It's true: George Washington basketball coach Mike Lonergan was once kicked out of his daughter's junior varsity game. But he's not apologizing -- instead, he's trying to inform everyone of how, exactly, that situation happened.
Appearing on "The Sports Junkies," a radio show broadcast by Washington, D.C.'s 106.7 The Fan, Lonergan explained that he'd arrived at the gym in the middle of the third quarter. At the start of the fourth quarter, his daughter committed a foul, and the scorer's table says it's her fifth, meaning she was booted from the game.
"So my wife, she's sitting … near me in the bleachers, I said, 'She doesn't have five fouls.' [My wife] said, 'No way she has five,'" Lonergan says. "So my daughter goes to the bench, bawling, she's crying, so I look over, I say, 'Hey, do you have five?'"
His daughter said she didn't. So Lonergan went to the scorer's table at the next timeout and asked the "little young lady" if his daughter really had five fouls. She says no -- she only counted four.
That's where things go sour.
"So some middle-aged loser at the scorer's table starts yelling at me, asking me who I am. I said, 'I'm nobody. I'm just, my daughter's down there crying, I know she doesn't have five fouls and I'm just curious why, you know, you got her for five," Lonergan says. "And then he called over a policeman -- who I knew, I used to play basketball with [him] -- so I just went into the hallway and talked with him, and then I just said, 'Well, I better get out of here.'
"So that was a little embarrassing, to say the least."
Here's the full clip where Lonergan discusses the conflict:
As for his daughter's injustice, it was never corrected. And Lonergan says he doesn't think his daughter even realized he'd been thrown out. Meanwhile, he's got a theory as to why he was treated so poorly.
"I think maybe I had a Nike shirt on, and since they're owned by Under Armour over there, maybe they got upset with that," he said.
