Well, again, I'm not sure that you're the arbiter of what's difficult for other people to accomplish. For many families, getting their kid routinely to sports practice and games might actually be pretty challenging financially and with respect to time investment.

Moreover, if the little league has spotty attendance, it might very well be worth a minimal effort to provide encouragement for attendance in the form of some sort of award.


So your issue is apparently not with the concept, but with the chosen reward. A certificate is fine, but a plastic trophy isn't, but maybe it is if it's small, but not large, but we don't want to really define how big is ok,...

Seems like a kind of petty thing to spend much of your time being irked by.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Stop talking about marathons. That was all covered in the Facebook video that christ posted in post no. 8.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

The science is clear that it devalues the medal for those that won and the people that lost are embarrassed because they know they didn't earn it.

What ages are we talking about here?

My kids got some sort of participation medals/trophies when they were real young playing soccer. At some point fairly early on it became competitive and that no longer happened.

I don't have any issue with it when kids are that young and all you're really doing is trying to get them to like it and keep playing.

The kids know the score, literally. I don't know how young they were but even before they officially were keeping score, the kids were all aware of the score and knew which team won. And the kids know who is good and who isn't.

A couple of comments:

1.) Perfect attendance award >> Participation award. To my recollection not a lot of people got the perfect attendance awards. If we're to believe Woody Allen -- and think that 85% of success is just showing up -- then attendance is a good thing to encourage.

2.) The whole awards issue gets a bad rap IMHO, because it's really not the core problem. The central issue is dumbass parents thinking they can artificially drive up their kids' useful self esteem by giving meaningless or fraudulent praise. The proliferation of participation awards was just a correlated measure of the phenomenon. If you aren't one of those stupid parents, then you've got nothing to worry about if someone gives your kid an extra phony trophy or two in their life.

Participation "award" is a souvenir from an event. Maybe it is a bit of an attempt from the RD to remind the participant of the event so he/she hopefully comes back again. Doesn't bother me at all, neither do I think it in any way cheapens the "real" awards. The recipient knows his/hers performance in a given event so it is not like they think anything else about ti.

Ad Muncher

Both my kids sports teams hand out awards for a variety of things ~ there’s an MVP which is pretty standard for the all-around best player/swimmer, and there’s some sort of ‘Most Inspirational’ or ‘Best Teammate’ for a kid who may or may not be physically gifted but is extra dedicated and supportive of the other kids (often one of the better athletes who goes out of his/her way to be inclusive of the new/slow kids, since most of the 1st-stringers tend to form their own clique). And, they also included a small extra recognition award for the kid who made the most early-morning practices (which were ‘optional’ but encouraged along w/ the required after-skool practices), and the kid who had the best attendance over the winter break period; so those were earned by putting forth extra effort regardless of whether the kid was elite or not.

Everyone also did receive a basic participation certificate, however.

I coached girls rec league softball..

heres what I did.. not necessary participation trophies but more something to remember. Team picture and a softball in a plastic case signed by all the players and coaches. Wood base...custom name plates etc etc. We ended up with league trophies anyways but those always just seem impersonal.. 2nd place/1st place this and that of said league. I wanted them to remember the friendships made..not so much the competition.