In other words, they are participation trophies.
In other words. they were a member of the team that won. They participated… I guess… on the team that won the whole damn thing. The Jaguars players did not get participation rings no matter whether they lead the team in rushing yards, or offsides penalties or most barrels of Gatorade dumped on a head coach by a member of the practice squad.
It’s a team sport. Teams, as a whole, are rewarded / not rewarded for winning / not winning. So I spose you could extrapolate it out to a “being lucky enough to sit on the bench for the team that won the whole damn thing” participation ring but ya know, freak freely.
You know 20 years ago I bet a small trophy cost a hell of a lot more than a small resin trophy today does (~$3). 20 years ago that would’ve been a buck and I’d wager there would’ve been a wider net cast to award them as well.
The other thing to consider is the point of engaging in sport? Is it to learn determination, resilience, coachability, and a life long engagement in the sport or is it only for physical skills? What kind of mastery are you exhibiting when you’re 10, when the lousy kid wipes the floor with you next year only because he finally grew into his body?
The development of these players is simply broader than a win/loss sheet and if by encouraging the younger set to keep coming back and learning and loving the sport, a $3 dollar trophy or $1 medal is a small price to pay.
I’m not trying to change the way the NFL does things. Give the 3rd string long snapper on the Super Bowl champs a ring, I don’t care. I’m not even saying he didn’t earn it.
And I suspect most kids who choose to play sports do so because they like it. Isn’t the jersey itself that you refer to kind of a trophy? “Look, I’m part of a team!” And there’s nothing wrong with that…it’s great to be a part of a team and to get some recognition for it.
Kids play sports, read books, join the Mathletes, enter art competitions etc. because that’s what they enjoy. My kids not one time ever said the reason they play was to get the trophy at hte end of the year. They played because they enjoyed what they were doing. Not once did my children come running home crying because their basketbal lteam lost by thirty points. They still went to practice and stil lwore the jersey.
They didn’t give up reading books because taht specific Hardy Boys novel sucked, they read the next one. They didn’t quit mathletes because they couldn’t solve an equation or stop entering art pieces cuz they didn’t get a ribbon. They participated because they genuinely enjoyed whatever they were participating in regardless of any reward at the end of the day.
They enjoyed participating with their firends… that cameraderie. None of my children became professional athletes, authors or Math professors as adults but they enjoyed those activities as children and they enjoy them now.
Sure absolutely but the trophy or medal at the end of the year just for participating? Pointless. The jersey IS the participation medal, absolutely. Those teams that did well got a little bump for doing it a little better. There is nothing wrong with that. Those that didn’t get a trophy or a medal still all showed up for try outs the next year or entered the next competition.
This isn’t really about participation trophies is it? Something else is bothering people who hate this idea. The world of sports hasn’t fallen apart because some kids got participation trophies. I don’t recall any kids joining ISIS because they did or did not get participation trophies. I think there’s something else to this because it’s just a plastic trinket.
You might need to set back with a wine spritzer, take a deep breath and chill, good man. You may be reading way too much into things. It’s quite possible that those who hate the idea simply think it’s dumb or disagree with the proposition without a shit ton more to it than that. No need to poison the conversation with insinuatiion.
Years ago I was involved in a pumpkin carving contest. I was probably between 8 and 10. Really, we just drew faces on the pumpkins, and an adult would carve them out. At the end of the competition, they gave out prizes for various categories: Scariest, Funniest, Most Creative, etc. And, everybody got a prize. I twigged immediately to what had happened – the categories were made up, one for each kid so that everybody got a prize. The actual work I did, the quality of my idea and how well I rendered it, was meaningless.
Now, if it was obvious to a young child that this was bullshit, shouldn’t that tell you something?
Well, possibly, yeah. But, on the other hand, in a more merit-based competition (and its inherent vagaries of taste and judgement) would all the losers learn an important lesson in trying harder, or would they give up and nurture inferiority complexes. Would the winner actually take the moral lesson that the victory was earned through hard work, and then be inspired to work harder? Why couldn’t the kid take the lesson that not participating is a good way to make sure not to be sad like all those other losers?
I think prizes for merit and prizes for participation ought to be used in conjunction, and thoughtfully. To put it in Games-Theory-For-Liberal-Arts-Majors terms, achieving something too easy to achieve is cheap, and we may feel cheapened by it. Achieving something too hard to achieve is also unsatisfactory as an expenditure of effort. If you get a chance to design the game, you want the risks and the rewards in balance. If your game is designed to elicit better and better effort from participants, then simply not having a prize for anything less than top performance (the ‘2nd place is the first loser’ school of though), then participants may be pushed toward feeling that putting in an effort at all is wasted. But the participation award would mean more if it were possible to fail to participate enough to merit it.
Speaking as precisely the kind of terrible athlete that participation trophies are supposed to be for…
Kids aren’t stupid. Kids who are terrible at sports KNOW they’re terrible. When their teams suck, they KNOW their teams suck. In soccer leagues where they don’t keep score, trust me- every kid on both sides knows the score (literally AND figuratively).
I know from experience, giving kids a trophy or medal just for showing up doesn’t accomplish much, if anything.
Nobody’s saying we should eliminate competition and not recognize the teams and players that won. I certainly have no problem with giving a trophy to the team of the player that won the championship.
What I object to is the idea that the only team or player that deserves recognition is the one who won the championship. The players that went out there every week deserve recognition for the efforts they made. If you tell them their efforts are meaningless unless they also win, I would expect most of them to figure they might as well stay home and watch TV instead.
…except i don’t think kids are out there playing for recognition. They are out there playing because they are kids…and they like to play…because it’s fun. In whatever activity it is. Parents are the ones who tend to get all over concerned about recognition and confidence in their abilities and fine tuning skills. Kids are playing cuz that’s what kids do. They play.
This.
This is it, in a nutshell. Harrison is a huge attention whore.
I actually agree that most kids probably are not playing for the trophy presentation at the end. But so what if they get it anyway? It’s a little bonus that makes some of them feel like they accomplished something on top of just having fun.
Despite the fact that your kids didn’t play for a trophy, would you physically remove it from their possession? I mean, would you actually take it away because it wasn’t “earned?”
No, that’s an obvious dick move. I wouldn’t take most things that were given to them out of good faith. I still think participation trophies are dumb and set up unrealistic expectations going forward. What’s that old saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions?
If these are “participation trophies,” and the kids participated, they did earn them. They don’t mean very much, but they are earned.
I disagree that the participation trophy sets unrealistic expectations. I don’t think kids then expect a trophy for everything they do. I don’t think the trophies are mandatory. I just think they’re nice for kids to put on their shelf when they’re 6 years old. And, as I said in post #1, at a certain age the participation trophy becomes completely unnecessary and those old trophies will come down and the kids move on.
I love this kid, but he most certainly did not earn a participation trophy on this day:
This would make a great, entirely new, social commentary, edgy sitcom plot.
Dad angrily denounces participation trophies for the team of lovable kids he has been inveigled into coaching and demands a return to the sheerer system that served him so well, of giving out the meaningful trophies only to those winners who most successfully ran around a field.
Doesn’t this “everyone’s a winner, nobody’s a loser!” mentality speak to a larger issue like academics as well? I mean, for kids that actually care about their performance in whatever they are doing, sports, school or otherwise, shouldn’t the reward mean as much as the sting of failure in the opposite direction?
My sons school stopped marking tests in red ink. As if the “F” in blue is so much “nicer” than the big red one.
There’s some kind of gradual pussification going on and I don’t much like it. I do happen to think that if kids are playing sports that they should keep score at all age levels. Introducing competition into a child’s life isn’t a bad thing, it’s a life lesson. They are sure as hell going to be facing competition at sports, for jobs, promotions, raises, etc later in life so the sooner they learn that the better in my opinion. Heck, my oldest son is a bench warmer in football and I am okay with that. He knows he isn’t the best player. You know why he’s on the team? Because the same guys that bullied him a few years ago are his friends now because he goes to war with them every day after school, cheers on their success on the sidelines and is a part of something bigger than himself.
That all said I don’t have a problem with participation trophies as such as long as there are other awards that delineate excellence. There’s nothing to strive, suffer and struggle for in life if there’s no type of reward somewhere down the line…then why even bother?