The Beauty of Competition: Humanity at its Best

I started this post while walking the dog. A sign at a youth baseball field laid out the basic things parents should remember: "coaches are volunteers, umpires are human and it is just a game".

It's sad that these simple terms have to be spelled out and yet society has wrongly deemed competition a disease to be avoided at all costs. Instead of the anger and hostility of parents at a child's baseball game being a symptom of something greater, the societal cure is leveling the playing field, not keeping score, stifling celebration as if it were caustic.

When children play a sport without parental intervention-they keep score, they compete, they chastise the weaker players, they learn the game. In the end they decide if they love or hate the game and they are better for it.

I was mocked as a baseball player. I had missed the first year of learning the game, this meant I was a year behind everyone else on the team. I wasn't good and it showed. No one adjusted anything to spare my feelings, it was brutal.

My reward: I did learn the game, I got better, I grew a thick skin and learned how to deal with children being unkind as they learned to be kinder, better people.

Competition is what makes people be the best they can be. We learn empathy as we all experience some sort of rejection or so called bullying, we learn how to defend ourselves and each other-we become better people.

The benefit of leveling the playing field is mediocracy for all and disdain from those who insist on controlling the game. The rewards are entitlement, laziness, unchecked egos. The players with more developed skills resent the lesser players and the lesser players have no motivation to improve.

We could learn a lot about people watching dogs in a dog park, they usually figure it out on their own. It's the nervous parent that often creates the battle from a minor disagreement. Intervention is often the road to escalation.

Back to the sign The reason we have so much anger and frustration at sporting events is from children growing into adults who've never learned how to handle competition. Keeping down competition ignores the basic human instinct while not allowing the important lessons to be learned how to be competitive and the humility and dignity to deal with competition from both sides of the game.

Later in the walk, I listened to a coach as he taught a bunch of very young kids how to play the game of baseball. He didn't pander, he spoke clearly and emphasized teamwork and cooperation. I felt encouraged that maybe there is a shift back to the old days, of teaching skills, working to be the best we can be, the art of teaching and learning the game.