Everybody Is Wrong About Participation Trophies

The world is unpredictable. But we pretend it isn’t.

That leads us to make a lot of foolish, counterproductive decisions.

Here’s a small example that you’ll think is ridiculous, but that is surprisingly revealing:

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Surely you’ve heard the argument against them. They’re the trophies that every kid gets for participating in youth sports programs. A few years ago, University of Louisville women’s basketball coach Jeff Walz went on a rant about them, which nicely captures the sentiment of trophy haters. “You finish last, you come home with a trophy,” he said. “You kidding me? What’s that teaching kids? It’s OK to lose. And unfortunately, that’s our society. That’s what we’re building for. And it’s not just in basketball—it’s in life.”

You can find countless examples of this. The kids today, we are told, are lazy and entitled because of the expectations set by these trophies. Maybe you believe this tale, and maybe you don’t. But I bet you accepted the foundational myth that the story is built upon — which is crazy because it’s also the easiest part to factcheck. Here it is:

Participation trophies are not new. They’ve been around for 100 years. Here, for example, is an article from an Ohio newspaper in 1922:

Trophies galore, it says! From the 1920s to the 1990s, participation trophies were handed out regularly — and were celebrated as a great idea. They were created as a solution to the competitiveness of youth sports in the 1920s, when many school districts became so concerned about harmful competition that they began closing their sports programs. A few decades later, people of the 1960s became obsessed with the idea of building kids’ “self-worth,” and the trophies surged in popularity again.

Imagine it: When boomers today accuse millennials of being ruined by participation trophies, the boomers forget that they also got participation trophies. They just don’t remember them. Because they weren’t important. These things have been with us for a century — so either they impacted a century’s worth of children, or they impacted zero years’ worth of children. You simply cannot decide that now they’re harmful. They never were, and boomers are their own evidence of that.

I bet you have questions. Why were people concerned about competition? What do child psychologists say about these trophies? What’s their real impact on children? I answer all of this in detail in the latest episode of my podcast, Build For Tomorrow, which you can hear here:

But in short, I want to tell you this right now: The trophies were not harmful, but they did come to represent some differences between generations. Younger and older generations respond to different incentives and express themselves in different ways. There’s nothing wrong with this change; it happens in every generation. But these changes look unfamiliar, and unfamiliarity is scary, and so we tend to equate unfamiliarity with loss. We say “this is gone,” instead of asking, “What will we gain?”

This brings me back to the point I opened with: We don’t like unpredictability. We don’t like not knowing exactly how change happens, or how to anticipate its impact. So instead of doing the hard work of understanding and adapting, we often reject the premise entirely. We say, “The world is very predictable. I can point to this thing over here, and I know exactly how it’ll impact that thing over there.”

That’s how you get a basketball coach sounding off about participation trophies. He’s trying to simplify his world, and rationalize his failures. In the process, he’s misunderstanding and demeaning the people he’s been tasked with coaching.

If you cannot appreciate a problem, you cannot create a meaningful solution. It’s that simple.

So where does that leave all of us? Here’s my advice: When you hear a tidy, simple story that explains a problem, approach it with deep skepticism. Inquire where it comes from. And then wonder, with the most open of minds, whether you’re looking at a problem at all — or if you’re simply seeing the early stages of opportunities yet to come.