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Health & Fitness

Confessions of a Newtown Sports Parent

Trophies, entitlements, and the how-we mis-lead our Gen Y'ers.

I really hate the whole “everybody gets a trophy” thing.

Please know that I’m in favor of equality. A bunch of the issues on the topic can get pretty inflammatory, so I’ll deftly avoid the heftier subjects, but when it comes to things like Title IX and equal pay for equal work, I’m a big believer in balancing the scales.

Now, as far as allowing two Dallas Cowboy fans to bear children, I have to draw the line there. We simply have to do a better job of controlling the gene pool, and that’s as good a starting place as any. (That was a joke, by the way.)

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But seriously, when it comes to awards and recognition in youth sports, the idea that “everybody gets a trophy” has always burned me up.

I’ve always maintained that trophies are for champions, the winners of something. Not just for the people who showed up to play the game or run the race. But somewhere in there, someone decided that at the end of the season we should hand a trophy to every kid who put on some shorts and a colored jersey.

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I’m not against recognition. I’m just against trophies as recognition for anything other than winning. Give the kid a certificate, a medallion. But unless they won the league title or a tournament or some other kind of championship, they don't get the marble-based, tiered-column hardware capped by a statue of a little guy/gal with a stick or a bat or a ball in his/her hands.

You may not see the nuance in my viewpoint, but to paraphrase/bastardize David Mamet, “Trophies are for winners. Put the Trophy DOWN”.

I’m going to avoid getting too dramatic on the contributions of this inane practice to the thinning fabric of our once-fortuitous national psyche, but stay with me and I’ll tell you why I think this is more important than making little Johnny feel good at the year-end team barbecue.

In the past 30 some-odd years we have produced multiple generations of young people who believe that rewards and recognition should come simply because they made an effort, however good or bad that effort was.

And that’s really bad -- because that’s not the way it actually works out there in the real world.

I was at a swim meet on Long Island about 20 years ago -- right after my daughter was born so I had no perspective yet as a sports parent.  A mom of one of the swimmers was begging the organizers NOT to give the kids who raced against her daughter the ribbons that signified first, second and third place because it would “humiliate” her daughter, who had come in dead last.

I have to believe that this mom’s desperate attempt to force competitive equality onto the swim meet to the benefit of her under-performing progeny was a constant occurrence in the ensuing years, making an indelible imprint on this young girl that would shape her sense of entitlement as she moved out of adolescence into young womanhood.

I have seen the results of this type of “everybody wins” mentality, and frankly, it isn't pretty.

The American workplace is chock-full of 20-somethings who believe strongly in their entitlements, that as long as they punch the clock and don’t throw up on themselves at some point each day, advancement and accolades should rain down upon them like they had just invented cold fusion.

They become uniformly despondent when immediate gratification doesn’t come their way. They are quick to grow impatient with their situation, and become increasingly frustrated when rapid progression up the ladder doesn’t happen, regardless of how many times the rationale is explained to them by their superiors.

They can't understand why they aren't being treated the way they always have been treated -- and they are incredulous that others are so blind to their "special-ness."

And while I realize that I sound very old, very crusty and probably very bitter towards these Gen Y creampuffs, please know that this isn’t just something I cooked up in some fit of jealous rage upon learning the terrible news that I will never be 27-years-old again.

A recent study by University of New Hampshire professor Paul Harvey measured the impact and presence of entitlement and narcissism in the workplace. The results show that Gen-Y employees have far and away the greatest sense of entitlement among all generations.

The entire study comes down to a depressing fact: Gen-Y workers want more and expect to produce less in return. 

And we did that to them. We made them that way, we continue making them that way, and it’s getting exponentially worse with every new group of college graduates.

We’ve constantly shoved the message down our kid’s throats that they’re special, and that they ALWAYS deserve to be recognized for being special, regardless of how the quality of their effort impacts their results.

I’m not trying to tell you that you shouldn’t feel like your kids are special, or that you need to remind them that as far as natural selection goes, they really AREN'T that special, they are just the random byproduct of one of 200 million sperm cells reaching its objective.

That’s way too much perspective and could potentially cause them to say "what's the point," give it all up, take off their shoes, sit in a tree and learn to play the pan-flute.

No, just let your kids know that in order to be recognized as being special they need to strive for something beyond mediocrity.  They need to do more than just show up for practice and go into the game when the coach calls their name. They need to give their best effort, and if they are lucky enough to be given a trophy it really does mean something special.

It means they’ve actually earned it. 

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