In my first ever football game, we got destroyed 40-something to 7. On the way home, my mom and I stopped for lunch at McDonald’s, and I asked if I could get a chocolate shake.
“Shakes are for winners,” my mom said.
This lesson my mom taught me at McDonald’s may seem like a silly little thing she said to try and stop me from eating calories that I obviously didn’t need, but it changed the way I viewed life. After that, I didn’t lose a single football game for two years straight, and every week when our team would win, I’d look forward to the shake, not only for the taste, but for the acknowledgement that my team did it. My team won.
It got so ingrained in my head that only winners get shakes that the tradition has carried on to high school. I understood and continue to understand that when my team loses, I don’t deserve a shake, because I haven’t played well enough to earn it. This is what we need our future generations to understand—if you didn’t do something well enough to be the best, you don’t deserve the best reward.
I’ve struggled for a long time with the idea that everyone gets the same reward in youth sports just for trying. As a kid, I played as many sports as I could, and I was pretty good at them. My team often went undefeated or finished with one or two losses, and every year, we all looked forward to our end of year party where every team got together, ate pizza and awards were given out. But when it was time to get our awards, we would get the same trophy as the team that didn’t win a single game the whole year, and it didn’t make sense to me.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for giving kids some recognition for playing a full season and for coming out and competing every weekend, but it’s when the team that didn’t lose a game gets the same trophy as a team that didn’t win a game that I have a problem. Kids develop a certain kind of entitlement that makes them think that they deserve everything that they want, and that they shouldn’t have to work for it. I think that a lot of this can boil down to kids getting the same rewards for not working as hard and not succeeding, but still getting recognition as if they actually accomplished something.
This kind of pampering and making a kid the center of the universe is ridiculous to me. We need to teach our young generations that if you work hard for something and you do better than everyone else, you’ll be rewarded—not telling them that just trying is enough.
I know that life isn’t as black and white as winning or losing a football game may be, but the same logic can be used in most situations. If you do something worthwhile, you deserve an award equal to what you did, not an award that is the same for everyone who tried.
– By Jonathan Robbins