The Medal Count - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

One thing that a particular sect of people who use social media (predominantly Facebook for this one) like to present is the narrative that they had/have it so much worse than some other group. (You can pretty much name your “other” here - women with men, men with women, older people with younger people, conservative white people with new Canadians, and the list goes on.)

 

We’ve all seen posts like this; you know, “In my day, we worked for what we got” or “We didn’t need safe spaces when I went to school” and so on. It’s not always older people, casting aspersions at younger people, but I think that tends to be the ones you see most frequently. 

 

And one thing these folks really don’t like is when they see younger generations discussing how hard things are for them; because they tend to view those generations as being soft - everything handed to them, still complaining. 

 

That, of course, is not true, but I’m sure that some readers of this paper will have finished the previous paragraph and thought, “And?”

 

One of the names these younger people will hear is that they are the “participant trophy” generation. Rewarded for accomplishing nothing, these people never learn how to fail or, more importantly, how to succeed, is how the story goes, regardless of its authenticity.

 

I grew up playing competitive baseball and my team took home a number of first-place trophies from the local level all the way up to province. I also, as you might imagine, ended up with a lot of participant trophies. 

 

And now, in praise of participation trophies.

 

My four-year-old daughter played soccer in Brussels this year. It was her first-ever organized sport experience and, frankly, both the words “played” and “soccer” should be in quotations. She was on one of four teams that took to the fields every Wednesday in her age group. There would be a bit of a warm-up and then the teams would play one another. There were no referees, no one kept score, but the kids always had fun, a few minor collisions and pushes aside.

 

Then, after the last game of the season, it happened. Tallulah received her first medal.

 

It’s very simple and inexpensive, with a generic soccer logo on the medallion and her age division engraved on the back, but it means the world to her now. 

 

She was so proud to come home to her mother and show it off, proclaiming that she’d won at soccer. For more than a week now, she’s kept her medal on her bedside table - only because we’ve told her she can’t sleep with it. She brings it back and forth to Lucknow most days so she can wear it on the drives and show it off to her grandparents.

 

It really has become one of her most prized possessions - all because she took part in a season of soccer over in Brussels. She can think back to the teammates she got to know and what she learned over the course of those two months and see it reflected back to her in the form of that medal she so loves. That kind of joy, whether she “earned it” in the sense that she won something that someone else lost, is hard to argue with, and that’s what those folks I mentioned earlier are missing in their lives.
They could just be crusty, mad at the world or want everyone else to be as miserable as they are, but they’re certainly missing that joy that a four-year-old has when she’s handed a medal for running up and down a soccer field for an hour each week.

 

Thanks to Brussels Soccer for inspiring at least one little girl - one little girl who now can’t wait to come back to soccer, and maybe even try baseball and hockey next year.