A professional football player is causing controversy this week thanks to his decision to return his young sons’ participation trophies, saying the 8-year-old and 6-year-old shouldn’t receive awards they didn’t earn.
James Harrison, a linebacker with the Pittsburgh Steelers, posted a photo to Instagram on Saturday explaining his reasoning.
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Harrison’s actions have been met with widespread praise from many regular folks who believe that youth sports culture in the U.S. encourages participation to the detriment of competition and building a winning attitude. After all, America loves winners.
When Winning Means Everything
Harrison’s message shows he clearly cares about his children’s wellbeing. But what he misses here is that instilling a mentality in young children that focuses solely on winning can actually be detrimental to the child’s athletic development.
Young children don’t typically care that much about winning or losing. Ask yourself how many games you won when you were 10 years old or how many goals you scored in youth soccer at that age. If the number is higher than zero, you’ve likely forgotten. In fact, most youth aren’t that concerned with winning before their teens.
“When my youngest son was about 10, he told me why he loved weekend soccer trips,” Lisa Endlich Heffernan, an author and soccer mom, wrote in the Atlantic. “Eighteen boys he likes, playing together on and off the field for 48 hours, with short breaks to sleep and eat junk food adds up to one happy kid. Winning? Winning, he told me, was fun, but even when they lost, the boys had just as much fun together.”
Placing an emphasis solely on winning can actually increase children’s anxiety levels and cause them to lose interest in sports or be too afraid to stop playing out of fear of disappointing loved ones. As someone with a past of playing and coaching soccer, I’ve seen many one-time stars tell me they never actually enjoyed playing the sport as children. Many give up the sport or play at the lowest level possible because any semblance of competition inflicts insurmountable anxiety.
Some teens “become so intensely uncomfortable and anxious in the face of competition that they suffer physically as well as emotionally,” according to Dr. Roni Cohen-Sandler. According to a 2014 George Washington University study, “Children cite “fun” as the primary reason for participation in organized sport and its absence as the number-one reason for youth sport attrition.”
W.T. Woodson High School in Fairfax, Virginia is one of the best public schools in the country and their athletic programs are often among the best in the state. But between 2011 and 2014, six students from Woodson committed suicide. One student, Jack Chen, left a suicide note that read, “There is too much stress in my life from school and the environment it creates, expectations for sports, expectations from my friends and expectations from my family.” Chen had a 4.3 GPA when he stepped in front of a train as a sophomore.
Stunting Athletic Development
Some believe that pressure is an important component of sports, and that a bit of anxiety can be turned into drive — after all, pressure makes diamonds. But this notion is disputed by some of the top youth-developing athletic programs in the world.
Fly across the Atlantic Ocean to the Netherlands for a visit to the world famous soccer academy of Ajax. Here, they have a different idea of how gems are formed. “Here, we would rather polish one or two jewels than win games at the youth levels,” David Endt, a former Ajax player and a longtime executive of the club, told the New York Times.
In Dutch youth soccer, professional clubs have youth systems that develop players on technical levels first and on tactics at later ages. Until the kids hit age 14 they will play against teams of all levels in order to develop their various skills. “Despite everything, the most important thing is that the kids have fun and enjoy what they are doing,” Babette van Haaren, a writer on Ajax and Dutch soccer, wrote in the Sabotage Times.
Huub Stevens, a coach at PSV Eindhoven (Ajax’s domestic rival) and former Dutch national team player, actually takes it one step further.
“In youth soccer, we must make sure that Dutch players are equipped with loads of creative ideas. Losing is part of the process, and for me it’s more important than winning, as it can be worked on together and players can learn far more from it!” Stevens explains in the book Dutch Soccer Secrets, written by Peter Hyballa and Hans-Dieter Te Poel.
Hyballa and Te Poel also found that winning should play “a subordinate role in the training process.”
When Competing Is No Longer An Option
Parents may want to consider some of the issues that can accompany extreme success in life — particularly when it comes to athletics.
Consider Michael Jordan, who won six NBA championships and five MVP awards during a storied career with the Chicago Bulls and is widely considered to be the greatest basketball player ever. Every kid who grew up in the 90s and stepped onto a b-ball court tried playing with their tongue sticking out of their mouth at least once, in iconic MJ fashion.
But now, at 52 years old, Jordan doesn’t know how to stop competing. And it’s taking its toll on his personal life.
Shortly before Jordan’s 50th birthday, Wright Thompson wrote an in-depth profile that painted the basketball legend as a man whose relentless competitiveness to win basketball games clashed against his aging body. Jordan struggled with his own mortality.
“I … I always thought I would die young,” he says, leaning up to rap his knuckles on the rich, dark wood of his desk.
He has kept this fact a secret from most people. A fatalist obsession didn’t go with his public image and, well, it’s sort of strange. His mother would get angry with him when he’d talk to her about it. He just could never imagine being old. He seemed too powerful, too young, and death was more likely than a slow decline. The universe might take him, but it would not permit him to suffer the graceless loss and failure of aging. A tragic flaw could undo him but never anything as common as bad knees or failing eyesight.
When winners reach the peak of their craft, they may struggle once the spotlight has moved on to others — and even, in Jordan’s case, grapple with the meaning of their lives.
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None of this means that Harrison is a bad father. He even says in his post that he will always support and encourage his kids; he just wants them to earn their trophies. Many parents worry that their kids will grow up spoiled and entitled and not value succeeding.
But exposing children to the harsh realities of life at a young age may not necessarily be more beneficial to them. It may even just be a way for parents to project their own qualms at the detriment to their kids.
“Older generations always find something to harrumph about in younger generations, true since Stone Age rock-heads,” Erik Brady wrote in USA Today on Thursday in a piece about why participation trophies don’t warp kids’ outlook of their success. “That’s all this really is, a belief that things were better in a past that never was.”