The Shape of the Complaint
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this critique of athletes, from athletes, from non-athletes, from bad-faith actors, armchair quarterbacks, and even otherwise respected thinkers:
If everyone gets a participation trophy, then there’s no value in winning anymore. This mindset fosters weakness.
The logic behind the criticism is simple and, on its face, reasonable. Standards and excellence, matter.
That much is undeniably true.
But the critique rarely moves beyond that starting point. It often stops where the thinking should begin:
Seeing a task through to the end is impactful, especially when doing so is difficult, uncomfortable, or uncertain.
This essay isn’t an attempt to defend participation awards, nor to dismiss concerns about standards. It’s an attempt to examine what we mean when we talk about recognition, effort, and achievement and whether we’ve been too quick to flatten a complex idea into an easy complaint.
Which raises the next question. What exactly, is a finisher medal acknowledging and what meaning are we projecting onto it?
Medals, Meaning and Symbols
A finisher medal, at its core, is just an object.
I’m reminded of the 1990s film With Honors. Joe Pesci’s character collects stones from places of personal significance…ordinary objects that matter only because of the stories attached to them. Each stone, he explains, is a reminder that he was there. That something happened.
Medals function in much the same way.
They aren’t inherently good or bad. They’re a pendant and a ribbon. George Carlin once warned about being “symbol minded”, a critique of our tendency to overvalue symbols while stripping them of context. The issue, he argued, isn’t the symbol itself, but the shallow meaning we assign to it.
Any reasonable person can agree that an athlete who finishes a marathon in six hours and twenty thousandth place did not perform at the same level as the runner who finishes in two hours and six minutes, in first place. The clock is unambiguous.
But context is important.
Does it matter that the six hour marathon was a triumphant return from a battle with cancer? Or that a child riding the bench on a youth soccer team is simply searching for a safe outlet from an abusive home?
- Effort matters.
- Passion matters.
- Story matters.
Recognition in these moments doesn’t claim that sub-standard performance is beyond critique or improvement. It acknowledges that the act itself carried meaning, that showing up was not trivial.
And in most sports, honesty is already enforced anyway. The clock doesn’t lie. Results are public. Physical consequences are unavoidable.
Asking plainly, what meaning do athletes assign to these medals and how does that meaning shape their growth over time?
The Interpretive Lens
A famous NFL player once made headlines for returning all of his sons’ participation trophies. His concern was clear: recognizing participation might confuse effort with achievement and, in doing so, weaken competitive standards.
The concern itself is legitimate.
But it raises a more important question, who holds the interpretive lens? Who is responsible for clarifying and assigning meaning to these symbols?
Because it is not the child’s responsibility.
What then, are the consequences of a parent returning the trophies? Proponents of participation recognition would argue that finishing a hard thing is meaningful. Especially when the pursuit is voluntary. Choosing to engage, to persist, and to complete something difficult carries value independent of outcome.
It’s worth asking whether returning participation trophies might do more harm than good. It can easily be demoralizing. It risks sending the message that effort itself was misplaced, that the experience wasn’t worth acknowledging.
Recognition for completion is documentation, not a declaration of victory. It records that something was attempted and finished. And when framed properly, these acknowledgments foster engagement, retention, and development which are the very conditions required for excellence to emerge later.
The disagreement, then, shouldn’t center on whether medals or trophies are received at all. It should center on what they actually mean.
This matters even more when we’re talking about kids, because in youth sports, meaning doesn’t just shape motivation. It shapes who stays, who leaves, and whoever gets the chance to improve.
The Developmental Reality of Youth Sports
If you’re not first, you’re last!
It’s a comically extreme phrase, but it has teeth. And more people may align with it than they’d be willing to admit.
Applied to child athletes, the message is clear:
- it encourages early sorting
- it reinforces hierarchy
- it applies pressure
The translation is hard to miss. If you’re not winning, you’re not good enough, and maybe you shouldn’t be doing this at all.
Some readers may nod along and think, precisely!
But from a developmental perspective, is that actually ideal?
Most National Governing Bodies, including USA Triathlon and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, operate under the concept of delayed specialization, often structured through Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) models. These frameworks divide youth sports into developmental phases, with true specialization reserved for later stages, typically beginning in the mid-to-late teenage years.
Before that, the guidance is remarkably simple... let them play.
- Let them explore.
- Let them struggle.
- Let them fall in love with the sport.
There’s a reason for this emphasis on retention. During USAT coach education, one statistic is especially hard to ignore... young female athletes quit sport at a dramatically higher rate than boys by early adolescence. Not because of a lack of talent, but because early pressure, early sorting, and early judgment narrow the funnel too soon.
Recognizing participation in the early stages isn’t a consolation prize, it’s a retention strategy.
Giving young athletes space to engage without premature verdicts has been shown to:
- reduce burnout
- create psychological safety
- pave the way for broader skills acquisition
Participation recognition, in this context, keeps doors open. It sustains interest. It allows the story to continue unfolding. Encouragement lengthens an athlete’s trajectory by emphasizing development over snapshots in time.
Declaring “if you’re not first, you’re last” is a premature conclusion for young athletes, especially when the real goal should be long term growth, not immediate hierarchy.
And if meaning assignment matters, if participation is developmentally necessary, then the responsibility for framing outcomes falls squarely on the adults in the room.
The Irony of First Place Medals
Let’s be honest. Winning is awesome. Success is admired. Champions are rare.
We put winners on podiums for a reason. We recognize their greatness, their mastery, and the effort required to get there.
But here’s the irony.
We worry about the optics of participation trophies declaring “you’ve arrived,” yet a first place trophy can do exactly the same thing.
Arriving at the top is lonely country. You’re often surrounded on all sides, and like a game of Risk, you can’t hold the territory forever. That constant pressure can become a breeding ground for burnout. Of course, winning is the goal. But when outcome becomes identity, something subtle can begin to break down.
When winning is the only goal, risk taking dissolves. Curiosity narrows and growth can actually slow. Maybe most importantly, it's no fun anymore!
And no one is immune to this... not kids, not adults, neither elite nor professional athletes.
Medals of any color are punctuation, but not periods. They’re information in a larger story, not the story itself. The problem isn’t who stands on the podium, it’s what happens once they step off.
What Is Winning?
Here’s the thing, you can win and lose at the same time.
Winning can be narrow or wide in scope, but the wider view matters more. If you disagree, consider why we grow frustrated with the veteran quarterback who won a Super Bowl a decade ago but can’t quite do it anymore. Is he still a winner?
Part of the discomfort comes from an expectation of permanence, an unspoken belief that winning should continue indefinitely. That expectation is purely outcome focused, and it robs us of any appreciation for trajectory, timing, and decline. It mistakes a chapter for the whole book.
Winning isn’t dominance without interruption. It’s alignment.
Winning is when values and pursuits come together, when effort and intention collide into something coherent, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
And, on a long enough timeline, winning is not the absence of losing.
Losing is the greatest coach we have, if we’re willing to listen. It informs. It sharpens. It reveals. Winning without losing is brittle, uninspiring, and over time, rather uninteresting.
Winning isn’t the moment you’re declared best.
It’s the moment you understand what comes next.
Final Thoughts
At some point, most debates about medals stop being about medals.
They become debates about meaning, about how we interpret effort, outcome, and identity over time. A ribbon or a pendant doesn’t decide any of that. We do.
Finisher medals, participation awards, and podium trophies all exist on the same continuum. They mark moments. They acknowledge something happened. What matters isn’t the object itself, but rather, the punctuation we choose to assign to it.
The clock will always tell the truth. Results will always be published. Hierarchies will always exist. None of that is in danger.
What is fragile is our understanding of growth, especially when we mistake snapshots for conclusions, or outcomes for identity.
Sport, at its best, doesn't deliver verdicts. It invites a conversation, one that unfolds over years, shaped by effort, loss, adaptation, and return. The danger isn’t in recognizing participation or celebrating victory. It’s in believing that any single result, good or bad, tells the whole story.
The purpose of medals is not to end journeys.
They simply remind us where we were, at a moment when something mattered enough to try.