‘Participation Trophies’ Are a Fake Crisis. Here’s the Real Problem for Youth Sports.

Originally posted in the WSJ by Jason Gay on April 24th, 2023

Is there a debate sillier than the one over “participation trophies”? Like an out-of-shape benchwarmer, our intermittent national bicker over the appropriate reasons to award hardware to young athletes has wheezed its way back onto the playing field.

This time the arena is North Carolina, where a trio of state politicians have introduced legislation to enact a statewide ban on youth sports awards “based solely on participation.” 

Public time and money well spent, that’s for sure. If there’s one thing that constituents want from their elected officials, it’s a heavy regulatory hand in the youth sports trophy industry.

Should this North Carolina bill become law, I would urge its three sponsors to spend the coming months traversing the Tar Heel state in a minivan full of sweat socks and fast food wrappers, popping in unannounced on Little League games, lacrosse contests and 7-on-7 flag football, making sure no child is awarded a shimmering figurine for anything less than a stellar athletic achievement.

Naturally, the participation trophy debate isn’t about the children, or even sports. It is yet another pastime for the recreationally outraged, a howl to make an easy score in the culture wars, earning back slaps from followers who think the planet is going to hell, thanks in part to socialist 7-year-old soccer programs.

The argument is basically this: Participation trophies are a gateway to sloth and entitlement, since they teach children that they will be rewarded not for effort or accomplishment, but simply for showing up. 

How is a child supposed to withstand the fickle winds of a harsh world, with clear winners and losers, if they are treated to shiny hardware for attendance

The fear is that giving a child a trophy for wandering through a three-month “season” is to instill a need for constant, unearned approval. Though the “participation trophy” debate is many decades old, it’s routinely portrayed as an example of modern coddling, and it’s only a matter of time before that trophy-hoarding 9-year-old is standing in an office asking for a promotion, a raise and a snowboarding sabbatical. 

As a current youth sports parent, with the highway miles and Coleman folding chairs to prove it, I am afraid to say I haven’t detected an epidemic. I have two children, ages 8 and 10, and I calculated the other day that over 15 or so youth sports seasons played, across multiple sports, in two different states, we have received a grand total of one participation trophy, which was awarded when my son participated in a shaggy local T-ball league when he was 5.

These were pre-kindergarteners who couldn’t tell time or tie their own cleats, much less hit a baseball, so nobody objected to the idea of them getting a $3 piece of tin for showing up to a crabgrass field once a week and trying to remember if they were left or right handed. If that makes me a facilitator of unhinged youth entitlement, then guilty as charged! 

As always, the attention-seeking outrage obscures a genuine issue. The problem with youth team sports isn’t that they’re giving out too many trophies to participants.  

It’s that participation is down, worrisomely. 

Numbers have been dropping for a while, both pre-and post-pandemic. According to the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, which monitors data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, the percentage of children aged 6-12 who regularly played a team sport dropped from 45% in 2008 to 37% in 2021. That drop was underway well before Covid—participation fell to 38% in 2019, the year before the pandemic. 

Not great. We can start with the myriad physical and mental health reasons why children should be athletically active—it’s exercise and exertion; it extricates them from omnipresent screens; it instills a sense of self and positive body image. All that, plus you usually get a cool T-shirt. And maybe a hat. 

The benefits of team sports are even more pronounced: learning to cooperate with peers, share common goals and problem-solve as a group. School sports participation has long been linked to improved self-esteem and academic performance. Some employers report seeking out candidates with team sports backgrounds, because they can thrive in a collaborative environment.

Sounds great, right? But numbers continue to drop. 

Retention is an issue. Children start playing, but quit. Others don’t start playing at all. A factor here is the shrinking state of recreational sports programs—the sort of casual, teaching-oriented leagues that many of us played in when we were young. These leagues take any child, don’t cost a lot and don’t act as if someone is going to lose a scholarship if a fly ball gets dropped.  

Recreational (and school) programs continue to be plundered by pay-for-play travel leagues, which hoard talent, overemphasize specialization, and put 100s of miles on the odometers of tired parents who can’t believe they have to sit through yet another indoor soccer triple-header. 

Travel sports, which can begin in the single-digit ages, alienate latecomers and slow-to-develop athletes, to say nothing of children from families that struggle to pay fees that can push into the thousands. Team participation increasingly correlates with income—just 24% of children from families with incomes of $25,000 play regularly, versus 40% from families with an income of $100,000 or more.

It’s a mess. Youth sports are becoming another domain of the haves, threatening the overall health of the sports themselves. The talent pool gets limited. The late bloomer is discouraged. For those who play, burnout rises, not to mention anxiety over playing time and repetitive stress injuries. 

Travel sports sell themselves as portals to glory and possible scholarships, but try finding a college coach who loves the grind of the current setup. Or an orthopedist.

To be clear: Youth sports remain full of generous adult volunteers who do it for all the right reasons. My children have been blessed to join thriving rec leagues. But intensity always looms. Gone are the unstructured games that many of us grew up playing, with no stakes, uniforms, or time limits. Instead we hear embarrassing stories of adults tangling with each other in the postgame parking lot.

We’re not rewarding youth sports too much. We’re forgetting to prioritize the fun.

If our politicians want a real youth sports crisis to tackle, there it is. If they take on participation, turn around the numbers and keep more kids playing sports, they’ll be doing a great service to children, families, schools, communities and the sports we love. They’ll earn the admiration of their constituents, donors and future generations. 

I’ll even get them a trophy. As big as they want.