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I STILL don’t get this obsession with “participation trophies.” I’ve never seen one, I’ve never met anyone who says they’ve awarded one to someone, and I’ve nev

I STILL don’t get this obsession with “participation trophies.” I’ve never seen one, I’ve never met anyone who says they’ve awarded one to someone, and I’ve never met anyone who received one. I’ve seen very minor “door prizes” that say, thanks for attending this event, etc. But this “participation trophy” canard has coasted for 30+ years now.

primitivesuave 10mo ago
"Participation trophy" has become a modern aphorism in many situations where people are rewarded for simply showing up.
- UncleMeat 10mo ago
  Here in this thread there are people who are insisting that the harm is specific to the physical object of a trophy, not some general thing given to everybody who shows up. It can't be both.
  - AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
    There's more than one person here, with more than one opinion. Expecting consistency is neither reasonable nor useful.
    - UncleMeat 10mo ago
      Maybe you can speak to those people.
Apreche 10mo ago
It’s a sports thing. If you go to some youth sports league, it is common that every kid will get a medal or trophy regardless of which team in the league won or lost. But it also exists for adults. Go to the NYC marathon? Everyone gets a medal. I’ve participated in a lot of organized bicycle rides. The rides aren’t even competitive like the marathon is. They are not races. But at the finish line everyone gets a medal regardless of what distance they rode, or how quickly. The harsh truth about the participation trophies is that boomers complain about them the most, but they are the ones responsible for them! I’m a millennial. I remember being in a youth basketball league in middle school. Our team did not win. At the final day, every kid on every team got a tiny trophy. I was very confused by this at the time. I expected only the best team to get anything. But who was running that league and decided to hand out those trophies?! Our boomer parents!
- mwillis 10mo ago
  A medal for finishing a marathon is not the same thing as a participation trophy.
  - _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
    Yeah, it literally is. A participation trophy is for finishing a sports season, or finishing an event (maybe a martial arts event, maybe a marathon). Finishing is something that can be especially challenging to finish/comit to week after week as a kid when your team isn't even winning, or you know you have zero chance of coming in first.
- AtlasBarfed 10mo ago
  Marathons and long bikes at least require you to perform a major amount of training and focus. Not everyone that starts at the line gets a medal because there are people that don't finish and they don't get their medal. Once you start moralizing about only winners should get medals or trophies, then you have to start looking at arbitrary distinctions like men's and women's different divisions, age divisions, weight divisions, pro versus amateur, college versus high school. Really the extension of logic is that only the champion of a given sport or event at the very highest level should get a trophy. I think what rubs a lot of people about youth sports participation trophies, is that you're basically rewarding just showing up, well devaluing actual focus training preparation or genetic advantage of the better players.
robwg 10mo ago
I take it you don't work in the corporate world. I see folks get "participation trophies" all the time, they come in different forms.
- esseph 10mo ago
  That's only if you're at a place that wants to make it look like they care. Most of the places I've familiar with really don't even put forth that level of effort.
- MattPalmer1086 10mo ago
  I've worked in the corporate world for decades across multiple different sectors and I've never seen anything like one. I'm in the UK though - maybe it's different where you are.
  - mingus88 10mo ago
    I find it hard to believe that the UK corporate world is so different that they don’t have mandatory trainings with fancy certificates presented to you at the end.
    - MattPalmer1086 10mo ago
      Oh that, yeah I've seen pointless certificates given out for doing crappy mandatory training courses. Although, the only place I've seen them is in a company whose HQ is in the US. So maybe that is more of a US thing too. To be honest, I never saw them as a participation reward. Everyone hates doing the damn things in the first place, nobody cares about getting the certificate.
colechristensen 10mo ago
A similar thread that you should have seen is grade inflation. Most people get A's and don't learn that much, teachers are punished for giving bad grades, a lot of people graduate without much added knowledge or skill. I would prefer no grades, but telling so many people they're doing top notch work when they aren't is a problem.
hebrox 10mo ago
I always have to think about "Eighty percent of success is showing up" when I read about participation trophies. I think it's a good idea to stimulate participation. "Winning" is something you only do if you participate a lot.
maxerickson 10mo ago
A lot of organized running events give everyone a medal as they cross the finish line. Part of my brain thinks it is a racket. The organizer buys them for $X and sells them to the event for a multiple. If that isn't the case, it still makes sense for whoever makes them to promote the idea, because they get to sell more of them that way.
- monsieurgaufre 10mo ago
  It also somewhat gives the runner the impression they are getting their money’s worth. Registration fees are getting really high. But yeah, it mostly gives proof / bragging rights that you finished it.
- paulddraper 10mo ago
  I got a medal for completing a Spartan race this year.
  - inglor_cz 10mo ago
    I think this is a genuine accomplishment.
    - paulddraper 10mo ago
      Thank you, I think so too.
- myvoiceismypass 10mo ago
  I have a whole closet full of this heavy junk - its not like I am going to hang them up and display proudly in my home. "Hey check this sweet medal from the 50K I finished last in 12 years ago!" At least race participation shirts have some utility.
- mingus88 10mo ago
  This is fine. Getting yourself into shape to even be able to finish a 5k or better is an accomplishment in itself. There is no comparison to the trophies that every little leaguer gets for having parents drop them off at practice. There are a handful of people who enter these events trying to win. They get money. For the rest of us, finishing represents a victory over the couch, that pint of ice cream, or general malaise towards bettering ourselves. So I’ll take that finishing medal and be proud of it. Besides, the same boomer generation who complains about participation trophies is the same generation who invented them.
matthewmacleod 10mo ago
I also just don't have the mental energy to get mad at that. You ran a marathon? Amazing! Great achievement! Well done! Have a participation trophy! Doing stuff is great. Doing stuff and sucking at it is great. Who cares?
singpolyma3 10mo ago
Interesting. As a child in the 90s I got one of these for everything I participated in.
- esseph 10mo ago
  This seems very much a location based thing. It sure as hell didn't happen in most places in Kentucky or Georgia.
  - _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
    Right. Wrestling meets totally didn't give out t-shirts that celebrated 'I participated'. Georgia/Kentucky are too tough for that.
    - esseph 10mo ago
      We didn't have wrestling. Wasn't a thing.
- mingus88 10mo ago
  Worth pointing out that a child of the 90s would have boomer parents. The very same generation that complains about the trophies invented the practice.
  - singpolyma3 10mo ago
    I definitely don't have boomer parents, haha. Boomer grandparents.
al_borland 10mo ago
I got one at a tae kwon do tournament when I was in middle school. It was my first time entering something like that, I lost immediately and was not feeling great about it. I just wanted to leave. My dad made me go back to pick up a trophy from this giant table full of participation trophies. I didn’t want it. I don’t know what happened to it. I didn’t understand why anyone would want a memento of an embarrassing loss. Participation trophies are stupid, or for people who are too dumb to realized they lost and it’s a pity trophy. Picking up that trophy was worse than the actual loss, I remember being more upset about that dumb trophy than anything else. This was back in the 90s. In something like a foot race, I get it. Most people running a marathon aren’t trying to win, they are just trying to finish, or hit their personal targets. They can still have a “win” without coming in first. But in a sport where there is a clear winner and loser, I felt insulted getting a trophy just for showing up. At 11 or 12 I already felt too old to be treated like that.
- mrugge 10mo ago
  I think this marathon attitude of not trying to win but to hit personal targets could be applied in other areas of life and in other sports even with clear "winners". None of this is about the destination. We all arrive at the same one.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  I like having a physical representation of something I did that pushed myself. In the case of a marathon it's normally a t-shirt. No one makes fun of that. But that t-shirt is 100% a 'participation trophy' but worse, it's literally announcing to the world when worn 'I participated'. So many anti-participation trophy tough guys wear these participation trophies all the time. Vietnam hat? Participation trophy. Fun run shirt? Participation trophy. Iron man shirt? Participation trophy. Police/military challenge coin? Participation trophy. Facebook picture post of an event you did? Believe it or not, participation trophy. But then it's given to a kid? Beyond the pale! Ridiculous! Why give them a memory/momento that they played baseball, that they showed up to sparing event, or did a form demo in front of judges. All things very intimidating to kids. I remember showing up to pee-wee football after doing badly in the game. As a kid it was intimidating to show up after doing poorly. That stuff can be as mentally pushing themselves as a marathon for an adult. Such a weird/small/toxic mindset to criticize rewarding that behavior, or thinking the kids that showed up all season for a losing team didn't accomplish anything.
Eddy_Viscosity2 10mo ago
Getting a thing showing that you participated isn't such a weird concept. It's just a physical momento, like a t-shirt from a concert or a lanyard badge from a convention. Getting a medal for doing a race is fine. It's a thing I can hang on my wall that I can look at and remember I did that 10k that time. A trophy is a bit weird and overkill, but a simple momento is just that.
burnt-resistor 10mo ago
They were a thing in the 90's and 00's for some K-12 events as fallout from the children's excessive self-esteem building movement. They usually took the form of cheap little ribbons rather than trophies. I always thought they were insulting and reminders of losing so I threw them away.
- eesmith 10mo ago
  They were not specifically a 90's and 00's thing! We had them in the 1980s in elementary school, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_trophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_trophy says the practice is over a century old, and the "backlash against participation trophies intensified in the 1990s." There's no need to take my work for it. The Arlington Heights Daily Herald Suburban Chicago (1975-11-28) article at https://archive.org/details/arlington-heights-daily-herald-suburban-chicago-1975-11-28/mode/2up?q=%22Participation+Trophy%22 https://archive.org/details/arlington-heights-daily-herald-s... describes how every soccer team member at a high school got a participation trophy. Speaking of ribbons, the same Wikipedia page points out "the US military has awarded ribbons to anyone who participates in surface combat". McConnell in "Rapid Development" points out how Microsoft in the 1990s used nonmonetary awards to boost morale. https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/270/mode/2up?q=award https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/270/... "I spent a year at Microsoft working on Windows 3.1. During that time, I received three team T-shirts, a team rugby shirt, a team beach towel, and a team mouse pad. I also took part in a team train ride and a nice dinner on the local "Dinner Train" and another dinner at a nice restaurant. If I had been an employee, I would also have received a few more shirts, a Microsoft watch, a plaque for participating in the project, and a big Lucite "Ship-It" award for shipping the project. The total value of this stuff is probably only two or three hundred dollars, but as Tom Peters and Robert Waterman say, companies with excellent motivation don't miss any opportunity to shower their employees with nonmonetary rewards." Those are all participation awards, yes?
_aaandrew 10mo ago
The participation trophies of the 80s and 90s were for the parents, not the children. (See sibling comment with 'tae kwon do tournament.') Perhaps it made parenting easier, "Be proud you tried, this shiny bauble is all the proof you need!" Or, IMO more likely, the parents liked the affirmation it awarded them for their effort and/or they made for easier status signaling when displayed in a pile for house guests to admire. I know as a kid I never gave two poops about 'em. They felt condescending.
y0eswddl 10mo ago
Not to mention the fact that the generation complaining about them is the same generation that gave them out in the first place!

primitivesuave 10mo ago

"Participation trophy" has become a modern aphorism in many situations where people are rewarded for simply showing up.

UncleMeat 10mo ago
Here in this thread there are people who are insisting that the harm is specific to the physical object of a trophy, not some general thing given to everybody who shows up. It can't be both.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo ago
  There's more than one person here, with more than one opinion. Expecting consistency is neither reasonable nor useful.
  - UncleMeat 10mo ago
    Maybe you can speak to those people.

Apreche 10mo ago

It’s a sports thing. If you go to some youth sports league, it is common that every kid will get a medal or trophy regardless of which team in the league won or lost. But it also exists for adults. Go to the NYC marathon? Everyone gets a medal. I’ve participated in a lot of organized bicycle rides. The rides aren’t even competitive like the marathon is. They are not races. But at the finish line everyone gets a medal regardless of what distance they rode, or how quickly. The harsh truth about the participation trophies is that boomers complain about them the most, but they are the ones responsible for them! I’m a millennial. I remember being in a youth basketball league in middle school. Our team did not win. At the final day, every kid on every team got a tiny trophy. I was very confused by this at the time. I expected only the best team to get anything. But who was running that league and decided to hand out those trophies?! Our boomer parents!

mwillis 10mo ago
A medal for finishing a marathon is not the same thing as a participation trophy.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  Yeah, it literally is. A participation trophy is for finishing a sports season, or finishing an event (maybe a martial arts event, maybe a marathon). Finishing is something that can be especially challenging to finish/comit to week after week as a kid when your team isn't even winning, or you know you have zero chance of coming in first.
AtlasBarfed 10mo ago
Marathons and long bikes at least require you to perform a major amount of training and focus. Not everyone that starts at the line gets a medal because there are people that don't finish and they don't get their medal. Once you start moralizing about only winners should get medals or trophies, then you have to start looking at arbitrary distinctions like men's and women's different divisions, age divisions, weight divisions, pro versus amateur, college versus high school. Really the extension of logic is that only the champion of a given sport or event at the very highest level should get a trophy. I think what rubs a lot of people about youth sports participation trophies, is that you're basically rewarding just showing up, well devaluing actual focus training preparation or genetic advantage of the better players.

robwg 10mo ago

I take it you don't work in the corporate world. I see folks get "participation trophies" all the time, they come in different forms.

esseph 10mo ago
That's only if you're at a place that wants to make it look like they care. Most of the places I've familiar with really don't even put forth that level of effort.
MattPalmer1086 10mo ago
I've worked in the corporate world for decades across multiple different sectors and I've never seen anything like one. I'm in the UK though - maybe it's different where you are.
- mingus88 10mo ago
  I find it hard to believe that the UK corporate world is so different that they don’t have mandatory trainings with fancy certificates presented to you at the end.
  - MattPalmer1086 10mo ago
    Oh that, yeah I've seen pointless certificates given out for doing crappy mandatory training courses. Although, the only place I've seen them is in a company whose HQ is in the US. So maybe that is more of a US thing too. To be honest, I never saw them as a participation reward. Everyone hates doing the damn things in the first place, nobody cares about getting the certificate.

colechristensen 10mo ago

A similar thread that you should have seen is grade inflation. Most people get A's and don't learn that much, teachers are punished for giving bad grades, a lot of people graduate without much added knowledge or skill. I would prefer no grades, but telling so many people they're doing top notch work when they aren't is a problem.

hebrox 10mo ago

I always have to think about "Eighty percent of success is showing up" when I read about participation trophies. I think it's a good idea to stimulate participation. "Winning" is something you only do if you participate a lot.

maxerickson 10mo ago

A lot of organized running events give everyone a medal as they cross the finish line. Part of my brain thinks it is a racket. The organizer buys them for $X and sells them to the event for a multiple. If that isn't the case, it still makes sense for whoever makes them to promote the idea, because they get to sell more of them that way.

monsieurgaufre 10mo ago
It also somewhat gives the runner the impression they are getting their money’s worth. Registration fees are getting really high. But yeah, it mostly gives proof / bragging rights that you finished it.
paulddraper 10mo ago
I got a medal for completing a Spartan race this year.
- inglor_cz 10mo ago
  I think this is a genuine accomplishment.
  - paulddraper 10mo ago
    Thank you, I think so too.
myvoiceismypass 10mo ago
I have a whole closet full of this heavy junk - its not like I am going to hang them up and display proudly in my home. "Hey check this sweet medal from the 50K I finished last in 12 years ago!" At least race participation shirts have some utility.
mingus88 10mo ago
This is fine. Getting yourself into shape to even be able to finish a 5k or better is an accomplishment in itself. There is no comparison to the trophies that every little leaguer gets for having parents drop them off at practice. There are a handful of people who enter these events trying to win. They get money. For the rest of us, finishing represents a victory over the couch, that pint of ice cream, or general malaise towards bettering ourselves. So I’ll take that finishing medal and be proud of it. Besides, the same boomer generation who complains about participation trophies is the same generation who invented them.

matthewmacleod 10mo ago

I also just don't have the mental energy to get mad at that. You ran a marathon? Amazing! Great achievement! Well done! Have a participation trophy! Doing stuff is great. Doing stuff and sucking at it is great. Who cares?

singpolyma3 10mo ago

Interesting. As a child in the 90s I got one of these for everything I participated in.

esseph 10mo ago
This seems very much a location based thing. It sure as hell didn't happen in most places in Kentucky or Georgia.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  Right. Wrestling meets totally didn't give out t-shirts that celebrated 'I participated'. Georgia/Kentucky are too tough for that.
  - esseph 10mo ago
    We didn't have wrestling. Wasn't a thing.
mingus88 10mo ago
Worth pointing out that a child of the 90s would have boomer parents. The very same generation that complains about the trophies invented the practice.
- singpolyma3 10mo ago
  I definitely don't have boomer parents, haha. Boomer grandparents.

al_borland 10mo ago

I got one at a tae kwon do tournament when I was in middle school. It was my first time entering something like that, I lost immediately and was not feeling great about it. I just wanted to leave. My dad made me go back to pick up a trophy from this giant table full of participation trophies. I didn’t want it. I don’t know what happened to it. I didn’t understand why anyone would want a memento of an embarrassing loss. Participation trophies are stupid, or for people who are too dumb to realized they lost and it’s a pity trophy. Picking up that trophy was worse than the actual loss, I remember being more upset about that dumb trophy than anything else. This was back in the 90s. In something like a foot race, I get it. Most people running a marathon aren’t trying to win, they are just trying to finish, or hit their personal targets. They can still have a “win” without coming in first. But in a sport where there is a clear winner and loser, I felt insulted getting a trophy just for showing up. At 11 or 12 I already felt too old to be treated like that.

mrugge 10mo ago
I think this marathon attitude of not trying to win but to hit personal targets could be applied in other areas of life and in other sports even with clear "winners". None of this is about the destination. We all arrive at the same one.
_DeadFred_ 10mo ago
I like having a physical representation of something I did that pushed myself. In the case of a marathon it's normally a t-shirt. No one makes fun of that. But that t-shirt is 100% a 'participation trophy' but worse, it's literally announcing to the world when worn 'I participated'. So many anti-participation trophy tough guys wear these participation trophies all the time. Vietnam hat? Participation trophy. Fun run shirt? Participation trophy. Iron man shirt? Participation trophy. Police/military challenge coin? Participation trophy. Facebook picture post of an event you did? Believe it or not, participation trophy. But then it's given to a kid? Beyond the pale! Ridiculous! Why give them a memory/momento that they played baseball, that they showed up to sparing event, or did a form demo in front of judges. All things very intimidating to kids. I remember showing up to pee-wee football after doing badly in the game. As a kid it was intimidating to show up after doing poorly. That stuff can be as mentally pushing themselves as a marathon for an adult. Such a weird/small/toxic mindset to criticize rewarding that behavior, or thinking the kids that showed up all season for a losing team didn't accomplish anything.

Eddy_Viscosity2 10mo ago

Getting a thing showing that you participated isn't such a weird concept. It's just a physical momento, like a t-shirt from a concert or a lanyard badge from a convention. Getting a medal for doing a race is fine. It's a thing I can hang on my wall that I can look at and remember I did that 10k that time. A trophy is a bit weird and overkill, but a simple momento is just that.

burnt-resistor 10mo ago

They were a thing in the 90's and 00's for some K-12 events as fallout from the children's excessive self-esteem building movement. They usually took the form of cheap little ribbons rather than trophies. I always thought they were insulting and reminders of losing so I threw them away.

eesmith 10mo ago
They were not specifically a 90's and 00's thing! We had them in the 1980s in elementary school, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_trophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_trophy says the practice is over a century old, and the "backlash against participation trophies intensified in the 1990s." There's no need to take my work for it. The Arlington Heights Daily Herald Suburban Chicago (1975-11-28) article at https://archive.org/details/arlington-heights-daily-herald-suburban-chicago-1975-11-28/mode/2up?q=%22Participation+Trophy%22 https://archive.org/details/arlington-heights-daily-herald-s... describes how every soccer team member at a high school got a participation trophy. Speaking of ribbons, the same Wikipedia page points out "the US military has awarded ribbons to anyone who participates in surface combat". McConnell in "Rapid Development" points out how Microsoft in the 1990s used nonmonetary awards to boost morale. https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/270/mode/2up?q=award https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/270/... "I spent a year at Microsoft working on Windows 3.1. During that time, I received three team T-shirts, a team rugby shirt, a team beach towel, and a team mouse pad. I also took part in a team train ride and a nice dinner on the local "Dinner Train" and another dinner at a nice restaurant. If I had been an employee, I would also have received a few more shirts, a Microsoft watch, a plaque for participating in the project, and a big Lucite "Ship-It" award for shipping the project. The total value of this stuff is probably only two or three hundred dollars, but as Tom Peters and Robert Waterman say, companies with excellent motivation don't miss any opportunity to shower their employees with nonmonetary rewards." Those are all participation awards, yes?

_aaandrew 10mo ago

The participation trophies of the 80s and 90s were for the parents, not the children. (See sibling comment with 'tae kwon do tournament.') Perhaps it made parenting easier, "Be proud you tried, this shiny bauble is all the proof you need!" Or, IMO more likely, the parents liked the affirmation it awarded them for their effort and/or they made for easier status signaling when displayed in a pile for house guests to admire. I know as a kid I never gave two poops about 'em. They felt condescending.

y0eswddl 10mo ago

Not to mention the fact that the generation complaining about them is the same generation that gave them out in the first place!