The Monkey Tree - Everyone’s A Winner? ...Sports Day Dilemmas

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Everyone’s A Winner? ...Sports Day Dilemmas

If you are reading this in June then it is the summer (or it’s dying remnants) and thus, there are certain things of which we can be sure. The West Country will shortly be four feet under water, people everywhere are soon going to start lamenting the absence of air conditioning on the Tube, and children nationwide will be gearing up for their annual Sports Day.

So far so good, except that Sports Day no longer resembles quite the same event that it did in my youth. My recollection is, of uneven grass running tracks, reluctant Dads pulling hamstrings 80 metres into a 100 metre parents race, and the kid who was off sick last week being forced to run the 1,500 metres because his name was put forward in his absence and he couldn’t get out of it.

Despite the somewhat ramshackle nature of the facilities it was, nonetheless, a competitive affair. Points were awarded, times were recorded and teams ‘faced off’ against each other.

Recently, however, there has been a movement to do away with Sports Day altogether. MP for Romsey, Sandra Gidley reportedly called for an end to the practice in a Parliamentary debate, whilst in Scotland, steps have been taken to remove the element of competition and instead to focus the day around fun and participation. No child will be a loser, and none will be winners. Instead everyone receives a medal and prizes are awarded for such achievements as “Best Cheering Team”. (I’d have to question exactly what they are cheering in this example given that nobody can actually win but, you know, whatever.) Most importantly, self esteem is preserved and no child is made to feel excluded because of a lack of athletic ability. To me the constant reminder that childhood obesity is a growing concern is evidence enough of why this trend should be reversed.

Now, I am not a nutritionist, or a psychologist or a child welfare expert. My qualifications for writing this article are simply that I have three daughters and unfettered access to Microsoft® Word. But as a parent, I can’t help but rail at any kind of attempt to remove competition from kids sport purely on the grounds that it seems like an incredibly stupid idea to me, for you see, competition serves a purpose far and above simply determining who is best at something. It can teach humility in defeat, and grace in victory. It can act as a spur for improvement, and offer reward for dedication and hard work. It can teach teamwork and discipline and can even be enjoyable once in a while, (provided it is not golf that you’re playing!).

It is hard to imagine that our recent Olympic success could have been achieved with a system whereby no children in the country played sport in competition. Perhaps, therefore, it is time to acknowledge that children can be, substantially, more resilient than adults and are far less prone to over reaction when faced with difficult situations. As a tenuous example; recently my 3 year old daughter took part in her first ever dance production. Now, I have made presentations to groups of over one hundred people, I have played guitar in a band and parallel parked my father-in-laws car on a hill. In short, I’ve done quite a few things that would make a man nervous. Yet none of these came remotely close to the anxiety that seized me on the night of my daughters show. What if she forgot her steps? What if she fell over? What if she was feeling as nervous as me?

In the end, my fears were ill founded, as it turns out that 3 year olds aren’t really required to do much at dance shows other than look very cute and wave wands around. My daughter had a whale of a time. Now she forces me to watch the video with her each weekend so that we can fully examine her rendition of “There Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” without the dizzying fear I had the first time around. To my pathetically untrained eye, she is not the best dancer in her group, but she takes great pleasure from it and generally does her best (assuming that there are no Disney Princess dresses in the vicinity, in which case she’s a total write off).

I’m aware that this is comparing apples and oranges, because dancing doesn’t have “losers” as such. But what does strike me is that most children are pragmatic about this type of thing. They will accept that they are not the fastest child in the class or, the best jumper in the year or, the best tap dancer in the cosmos, if it is explained to them properly. Frankly, this is not a bad lesson to learn as life is little more than a series of interlinked exams, interviews, appraisals and reviews – all of which compare us to our peers, and all of which will challenge our self esteem.

Perhaps, more importantly, children will actually understand what it means to lose and, as strange as it may sound, this could be the most important lesson of all. The old adage that one learns more in defeat than victory is true for all aspects of life and, as such, I baulk at the idea that my children should be protected from the notion that they are ‘not the best at everything they do’. Of course, given that my daughters watch West Ham with me they are all fairly au fait with this idea already, but it’s the rest of you I worry about.

Whilst the logic is that there are children who ‘feel deflated’ by sport being a valid concern, I struggle to reconcile that with the knowledge that there are, doubtlessly, children who feel alienated by their lack of academic success as well. Strangely, I have yet to hear anyone suggest that academic exams should be abandoned because of the low self esteem of those who fail them. Instead, results are pinned on the wall or read out in class, and in most schools children are divided up and streamed according to their ability, further emphasising the gulf in skills. I cannot reconcile this approach with a sudden desire not to embarrass kids who can’t run very far.

Perhaps, the strangest aspect of this whole discussion is that, for children at a very young age, the sports they are competing in are so weird ( the egg and spoon and sack race for example) that I’m a little confused as to how they came into existence to begin with. Events like the Javelin and Shot Putt have their origins in ancient martial skills, and the champions would often be great warriors. It seems unlikely to me that any of the Kings of Sparta ever decided to tie two of these champions together and have them race each other in pairs, on the grounds that three legs were better than two! Alternatively, I cannot imagine Darius of Persia determining who the champion of his kingdom was by having all the contenders line up in hessian sacks and jumping 100 metres whilst being laughed at by his courtiers.

I digress. For the point of this article was to examine whether a Sports Day served a purpose other than to humiliate the unfit kids who spend more time on their PlayStations than they do on playing fields. And I would argue that they do.

We should want our children to play sport. The level of competitiveness is really up to you. But in an era where obesity is rife, and schools are providing less opportunity than ever, parents should want their child to obtain exercise wherever possible.

James Kearns writes a weekly West Ham United blog, “The H List” which can be read at
http://thehlist.blogspot.com/