By seventh grade, with even more refinement in skill and separation of the good athletes from the bad, at the end of basketball season our coach presented each of us with a faux newspaper where the headline contained some accomplishment of each player from the year. (To this day, I still remember mine.) Additionally, one practice each year, usually after a game in which we got clobbered, after warmups, he would sit us down and talk a little about each of us in front of the team. It was outwardly a bit embarrassing, but inwardly, it gave me perspective and calm. Invariably, we would win the next game.
At the time, I did not know why these coaches did what they did. When I reached the age where I could coach my kids and their friends, I came to realize that they used these tools as age-appropriate ways to develop a sense of belonging, identity, and resilience. Nowadays, people just call them...
Participation trophies.
These unjustly vilified hallmarks of a "soft generation" have received a bad rap over the last couple of decades (exemplified most recently by the rant of Louisville's women's coach Jeff Walz). Those of us molded by the children and grandchildren of the Great Depression hear all about Vince Lombardi, Woody Hayes, Paul "Bear" Bryant, and others whose life mantras get summed up by "win at all costs". This ethos stems justly from living at a time when scarce resources meant that survival required winners and losers, survival of the fittest, and all that. This philosophy found root in every aspect of our lives. Sports provided the natural, but not only setting. We had to have "the best grades", "the most friends", "the best clothes", and so on. And later in life, we were told, that is how the world will operate. You either win or you lose, and if you lose, you will not survive. Life has only a small number of winners, and they get the rewards. The rest of us lose. As Alec Baldwin so eloquently delivers in Glengarry Glen Ross, "first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired."
The truth I have learned over my years of working, coaching kids, and generally living life comes down to this: the world lied to us. Although a situation here and there presents an opportunity for winners and losers, they do not dominate life. What I see more often floats between a need for total cooperation and a delicate balance of competition and interwoven-ness. Restaurants provide some good examples: they definitely compete for customers, but no restaurant wants to have the only spot on a strip. People go out to eat more often when a strip or community has a variety of options. There is still a need to work smart on thin profit margins, but restaurants do not want a lack of competition...just a manageable amount of competition. Within the restaurant, wait staff need to hustle and work to keep things moving and (regrettably) get the bulk of their pay from keeping their customers happy. This can lead to a cutthroat atmosphere, but in large part, these workers recognize that if they do not work together and the restaurant gets a bad reputation, they will have no one to fight over.
Examples like this abound. Natural disaster occurs? Everyone pitches in to help everyone, not some randomly chosen winners. A community member gets cancer? Everyone pools resources, holds a fundraiser, cooks meals, drives them to treatments. We do not seek out these opportunities to embolden ourselves (psychopaths excepted), but rather to sacrifice ourselves for the betterment of another.
Also, I have found that another old axiom actually inspires our efforts more so than "win at all costs"...
"An honest day's work for an honest day's pay"...aka, a paycheck. The ultimate participation trophy.
Just like the ice cream cone, if you show up and give all you can, you get the reward. If you go above and beyond, you might even find a little bonus, but all in all, honest work for an honest boss gets you an honest day's pay. When we go home to our family and friends, our value comes not in how much we have won, but in how much time we give, and how truly there we are.
I have also learned that those who cannot give up the "win at all costs" mentality can cause some of the greatest pain. People who must "win the deal" at the cost of another: misanthropes who prey on the elderly or uneducated, market manipulators who play the game for the game's sake instead of identifying how best to place capital for the improvement of life, psychopaths who pollute the environment in order to minimize their costs and maximize profits. This same mentality finds its home in the kids who constantly and mercilessly attack the weakest link in their opponents, coaches who manipulate league rules to win instead of developing the talent of their players, or young people coached to break the rules so often with the thought that the refs will not call everything and the other team is likely to respond and get an equal number of penalties.
We can teach our children to give everything they have, develop their skills to the best of their abilities, and play the game to win....you owe yourself and your competitor to do that. But defining the result by winning and losing, by a score, but an outcome that invariably allows only half of the participants to share in the result, does not have to drive our thinking. We should drive our children to constantly improve themselves, to take risks, and to find satisfaction in giving maximum effort.
In short, we need them to find joy in the participation trophy regardless of who wins.
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