🏈 A bit off topic: A hat tip to the Steelers James Harrison for his stance on participation trophies.

[Rolltide24]

I have returned several for my daughter and my parents stopped several coaches from giving me trophies. Now all of a sudden this is news. This has been happening for decades.

 

[stallingsstyle]

Could this be the problem with todays QB's?

 

[bamachine]

I am firmly in the camp that once they start going to school, the participation trophies should come to a halt. One of my brothers was a special education teacher, even he did not give those out, the kid had to actually accomplish something to get a reward. As a result, he had way higher scores on advancing those kids education. Once the school district told him to stop, so the other teachers would not look bad, that is when he quit teaching and coaching. Our education system sets kids up to fail.

 

[BamaFan334]

I understand what you're saying but the original article is about Harrison denying his kids their trophies. You brought up Alabama. Many teams don't get the opportunity to take the second place trophy home and it's a shame that second place is considered a failure. How many teams didn't get the chance to take second place? Yes, we want to win, but there is still a significant amount of achievement if you're second. When Alabama lost to tOSU, did you think they sucked as a program? Was it first place or no place? If Alabama didn't have a history of success, would you be happy to earn a first-time bowl birth? I don't believe Vandy will win the SEC any time in the near future, but if they were to be invited to the Peach Bowl, do you think their fans would consider the season a success - for them?

In business, companies can quickly decline with a leadership mentality of "all or nothing." Would you succeed more if your boss only pointed out your failures or identified your successes and areas for improvement along with a plan to improve? I follow Thomas Edison's philosophy: "I've never failed. But, I have discovered 10,000 ways not to do something."

You can set early expectations of "championships only" but kids aren't adults and they don't think like adults. Trying to put an adult mindset into a kid won't work. How many times did you lose a game as a kid? When you lost were you a failure? As kids get older, everyone doesn't get a participation trophy. Expectations are raised through life. If you played sports in high school, did everyone on the team earn a varsity letter (they didn't at my high school)? Participation trophies are simply a way to keep kids excited about a sport. Eventually they will migrate to sports that best suit them but kid sports should be about the fun of the game, the team and the competition. Winning is a bonus. My kids are past kid sport age, but when/if I have grandchildren, I will watch their games and tell them how great they did - even if they can't play a lick. I will encourage them to continue playing (not everyone is a star at the beginning) and getting better. If they lose, I won't say they failed.

You're simply taking everything I said and then disregarding it with your response. You're coming across as an individual that accepts mediocrity. Businesses fail when mediocrity and less than the best is accepted. You go to a restaurant and enjoy it when your food is not good? But hey, the cooked tried. Where in business are you seeing them accept C or D students and then succeeding.

Vanderbilt may not win the SEC, but they damn sure don't come into the season thinking they'll win two games. They want to win it all. Do they deserve a trophy for last place in the SEC? Work harder and win the trophy and recognition. Their coach letting them stop running half way through a drill if they're tired and tried? Hell no, he demands perfection. Bear Bryant wouldn't celebrate a runner up trophy.

As far as the kids are concerned, do me a favor and read each post where I simply laid it out. I will praise my kid's effort and continue to support them, but not every effort deserves pizza or ice cream afterwards. Let me know if you ever paid your kids for making C's or whether you allowed them to clean their room "to the best of their ability" and then you came in afterwards still picking up clothes or trash. Set the bar low in your household all you want, but real life doesn't support that.

 

[OldPlayer]

You're simply taking everything I said and then disregarding it with your response. You're coming across as an individual that accepts mediocrity. Businesses fail when mediocrity and less than the best is accepted. You go to a restaurant and enjoy it when your food is not good? But hey, the cooked tried. Where in business are you seeing them accept C or D students and then succeeding.

Vanderbilt may not win the SEC, but they damn sure don't come into the season thinking they'll win two games. They want to win it all. Do they deserve a trophy for last place in the SEC? Work harder and win the trophy and recognition. Their coach letting them stop running half way through a drill if they're tired and tried? Hell no, he demands perfection. Bear Bryant wouldn't celebrate a runner up trophy.

As far as the kids are concerned, do me a favor and read each post where I simply laid it out. I will praise my kid's effort and continue to support them, but not every effort deserves pizza or ice cream afterwards. Let me know if you ever paid your kids for making C's or whether you allowed them to clean their room "to the best of their ability" and then you came in afterwards still picking up clothes or trash. Set the bar low in your household all you want, but real life doesn't support that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! You can't put adult expectations on kids. Too many kids get burnt out on sports because of the coaches' and parents' demands and expectations. If coaches and parents demand too much, the fun goes away and they no longer want to play. It is a game at that level. It becomes a business or a means to another level later in life. Reward them for their accomplishments but winning a championship should be a goal for kids, not an expectation.

Coach Bryant would celebrate the accomplishments of the team and accept responsibility for any failures. He wouldn't hold back recognition if the team or an individual player didn't achieve 100% of the goals.

In terms of your comment "Set the bar low in your household all you want, but real life doesn't support that," I grew up in a household where the bar was adjusted to the capabilities of each kid. I had one sister who was mentally handicapped. The expectations for her were different from the other kids. My brother wasn't the best student. He wasn't expected to get straight As. Real life did support this scenario.

 

[BamaFan334]

Whoa, whoa, whoa! You can't put adult expectations on kids. Too many kids get burnt out on sports because of the coaches' and parents' demands and expectations. If coaches and parents demand too much, the fun goes away and they no longer want to play. It is a game at that level. It becomes a business or a means to another level later in life. Reward them for their accomplishments but winning a championship should be a goal for kids, not an expectation.

Coach Bryant would celebrate the accomplishments of the team and accept responsibility for any failures. He wouldn't hold back recognition if the team or an individual player didn't achieve 100% of the goals.

In terms of your comment "Set the bar low in your household all you want, but real life doesn't support that," I grew up in a household where the bar was adjusted to the capabilities of each kid. I had one sister who was mentally handicapped. The expectations for her were different from the other kids. My brother wasn't the best student. He wasn't expected to get straight As. Real life did support this scenario.

A mental handicap is a major difference than what we're talking here, so don't apply that to this conversation as we're discussing 100% healthy and able kids. I agree it's a game until a certain age, then you teach the kids to compete. Not being a good student doesn't mean you can't succeed, but being a bad student and accepting failure is another animal. Defeating your weaknesses is something we should teach our kids. Run sharper routes, cut harder, push yourself harder to increAse your bench max, it's all an effort to get better and win. Teaching your kids it's ok to slouch, jog, not be enthusiastic is allowing them to be confident in their current state with no push to get better.

Coach Bryant pushed his athletes to the brink and then taught them to win. He never said it was ok to come in second. He pushed them to win. He may have embraced their efforts, but rest assured he pushed them to be #1 and did not reward them for being #2.

 

[bamachine]

Giving verbal praise and giving awards are two different things altogether. Like I said, after they start school, participation awards should come to an end. Need to prepare the kids to work towards something, not reward them for doing nothing or very little. We understand that not every kid has the same talents or blessings but you should only reward positive progress from a certain age. This is not only for sports but academics and extra curricular activities as well. The point is not to give out trophies and/or awards to every kid. It minimizes what one kid does and glorifies another that does not put forth the effort.

 

[nastynate05]

After they start school? So kindergarten? 5 year old kids?

lol you guys crack me up. "If we give these 6 year old kids trophies when they didn't get first place we are setting them up to accept failure".

And just because a team doesn't win a "championship" doesn't mean there wasn't positive progress. Every single kid on my little league team this year had improved by the end of the season. And they all put in the effort to get better. Lost to the #1 team in the playoffs by a couple runs, a team which run ruled us in the regular season. But yeah, fuck giving those kids an award at the end of the season for working hard for 3 months and becoming better baseball players. It was an honor to shake their hands and hand them a trophy and tell them great job on the season.

Life lessons are taught in pregame, midgame, and postgame talks with these kids, not at end of the season parties.

 

[OldPlayer]

A mental handicap is a major difference than what we're talking here, so don't apply that to this conversation as we're discussing 100% healthy and able kids. I agree it's a game until a certain age, then you teach the kids to compete. Not being a good student doesn't mean you can't succeed, but being a bad student and accepting failure is another animal. Defeating your weaknesses is something we should teach our kids. Run sharper routes, cut harder, push yourself harder to increAse your bench max, it's all an effort to get better and win. Teaching your kids it's ok to slouch, jog, not be enthusiastic is allowing them to be confident in their current state with no push to get better.

Coach Bryant pushed his athletes to the brink and then taught them to win. He never said it was ok to come in second. He pushed them to win. He may have embraced their efforts, but rest assured he pushed them to be #1 and did not reward them for being #2.

I bring up the mental handicap just to point out that you set goals and expectations based on ability. I've never said anything about accepting failure. It is important to set achievable goals and not simply demand top results. If you have a C student, you encourage them to get Bs. If you run a 5.0 40, you strive to get to 4.9. I agree that we should teach our kids to give 100% effort. That's really what the participation trophies represent. The kids are asked to do things (try hard, give effort, show teamwork and spirit, learn the plays, etc) and if they do, they get a trophy. If they do it very well, and as a result they win a lot of games, their trophy is bigger.

Kids need to learn the team concept (if you've ever since pee wee soccer and the swarm around the ball, you'll understand how much they don't understand it) and participation trophies help to enforce the concept. Once these principles are learned, the participation trophies go away and everyone focuses on the team goals. As kids get older, it also becomes a selection sport and not a participation sport. Players are selected to be on the team versus everybody who signs up is on a team. Coach Bryant won because he selected players who wanted to win and worked to get them to perform as a team. He was an excellent judge of a player's willingness to make sacrifices. Winning was secondary. He would emphasize that if all 11 players on the field did their job to the best of their ability, they would win. It was his job to get the right 11 players on the field or to call plays based on the abilities of the 11 on the field. The toughness of Coach Bryant's practices was to make sure he had the right people on the field at the right time and could out-hustle the opponent in the fourth quarter.

 

[RhinoGuy]

I steal kids trophies when I get jelly.

Little fucks flaunt those trophies to look like they are better than me. Sonsabitches

Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk

 

[bamachine]

After they start school? So kindergarten? 5 year old kids?

lol you guys crack me up. "If we give these 6 year old kids trophies when they didn't get first place we are setting them up to accept failure".

And just because a team doesn't win a "championship" doesn't mean there wasn't positive progress. Every single kid on my little league team this year had improved by the end of the season. And they all put in the effort to get better. Lost to the #1 team in the playoffs by a couple runs, a team which run ruled us in the regular season. But yeah, **** giving those kids an award at the end of the season for working hard for 3 months and becoming better baseball players. It was an honor to shake their hands and hand them a trophy and tell them great job on the season.

Life lessons are taught in pregame, midgame, and postgame talks with these kids, not at end of the season parties.

You can reward them in other ways than participation trophies. Maybe give them all a team photo album, or something else to memorialize the season, along with the end of the season party. They need to learn the difference in winning versus just trying hard. When everyone gets trophies, some of that is lost. Also, not all coaches/teams are like what you stated, they learn no lessons and then get rewarded for it. The next season, make sure that team has a better teacher/coach. I am also not saying they just need to fix this but also fix the way they are educated. Parents also shouldn't drive their kids into being in an activity they do not like and force them to work at it. If they are in an activity and are not taking part, the parents need to find out why, the try to find something their kids do want to work towards. I just don't believe in awards for everybody, after a certain age, maybe you can bump it up to 3rd grade, as that is usually about when kids usually tend to go one way or the other, even though they are already forming their work/life habits at an even younger age.

Now all my ideas are unlikely to happen as things have changed too much from when I was a kid, to turn that boat around. In my 4 seasons in Dixie Youth baseball, for example, the first season we finished third and got 3rd place trophies(the lowest trophies offered by the league). My second year, I was on two teams, the 1st place finishers and an exhibition team(sort of like an expansion team). That second team's games did not count for the record book and was unable to be awarded anything by the league. It was coached by my brother who was a teacher at a small country school, right after he got his teacher's degree. He rounded up a bunch of kids from that school(plus me) that had never played and he and I taught them how to play. They were a real life version of the Bad News Bears, they ended up something like 2-14 but both of those wins were at the end of the season, a couple of those kids went on to play college ball. Needless to say, those two were more physically gifted than I but I(and my brother) were the ones to first teach them the game. They got no trophies but they all got a baseball and we had a signing party, everyone took their ball around to get it signed by each other. I actually cherish that much more than that 3rd or 1st place trophy. Did not get any trophy in the last two years, both of those teams finished around 6th out of 12 teams. Both had the after season parties, one team had the team photo album, put together by several of the parents, the other team just had us a BBQ with all the Cokes our parents would allow. My personal reward each season was being selected to the All-Star team and not for my hitting, for my defense and base stealing(on my few walks and even fewer hits).

The education system is just as bad, even worse, now. There are some good teachers left but far fewer than there used to be. When I was a kid, the bad teacher was the anomaly, now it is the norm. Many school districts have even instituted regulations to prevent teachers from teaching the kids too much, so as to not embarrass other teachers and to get funding from the state/feds. Excelling and making progress on the crappy systems should be what garners funding, not failing. These type policies ended up running my brother out of teaching, as they did not want him to teach, they wanted him to babysit his kids and he refused to do it their way.

 

[planomateo]

How does getting a trophy for participating impact kids as adults is the bigger question? I have yet to see anyone link kids getting trophies to something much later in life.

Much ado about nothing...