My article on the need for a good balance between fair competition and inclusivity for the LGBTQ community has raised a question about the need for fair competition. Why, I was asked? Why is fair competition important? Is it good for us? Is it good for our kids? The questions were posed by a parent who was concerned about whether they had done the best thing for their kids by having had them in sports. They were reacting to comments from a friend who was convinced that putting kids in sports exposed them to all kinds of psycho-social ills. 

 I’m going to address those questions in two ways. First, I’m going to spout a bunch of reaction off the top of my head. And when that’s all done, I’m going to do my usual thing and try to find out what scientific research tells us. Instinctive me will compete with scientific me.

I am something of a competition addict. When I first started working out in fitness gyms, as a young man, I found it very difficult indeed to get my ass out of the chair and into the gym. But if I had a game of racquetball or squash booked, I would go early to stretch and work out a little to warm up and following the squash game I would work out for a while just because I was there already. But it was the lure of the competitive game that got me out there and perhaps led to me doing some things to improve my fitness.

I’ve never particularly admired people who are out there, pumping iron to look good – bunch of sick narcissists if you ask me. But if I see a person doing intense, punishing work-outs in aid of their area of competition, I admire their dedication to their sport. So, why? Why is competition important and good for us? I’m going to confine my response on this subject to athletic competition. Looking at all forms of competition is simply too much scope for me to want to tackle.

A kind of simplistic Darwinian response is that competition is important for us to attract a mate and ensure the continuation of, and indeed the improvement of, our DNA line. The need to be bigger, stronger,  and faster ensured the survivability of the species, and the urge to display that physical superiority was as much a mating ritual as anything else. As we become less of a hunter/gatherer society, and as we move to adopt rules of civilized behaviour, the need for physical superiority is less important. But it still is a factor in mating behaviour. Great athletes attract desirable partners – you can rail against the stupidity and shallowness of that if you like but I defy you to seriously challenge the validity of that statement. (Sadly, my athletic ability has never motivated any woman to admit to a desire to have my babies).

None of that was ever very important to me. I think of myself (charitably) as a decent athlete but never a great one. I’ve never been the biggest, fastest or strongest. I once described my athletic ability as being “good enough to make the good athletes sweat for their victories.” I had no expectation of achieving distinction, yet competition was always important to me. I wanted to challenge myself against those who were better athletes than me. 

Why? Because sometimes, against all odds, in the middle of a competition, you do something exactly right. When it happens, your body executes a skill to perfection almost before you can think about what you wanted to do, and it feels wonderful. I can remember, with absolute clarity, goals I scored in hockey fifty years ago, a spectacular catch I made in the outfield, a brilliant catcher’s throw to catch a would-be base stealer. I won’t bother trying to describe them, because they were exceptional plays only to me. To my team-mates, they might have said nice pass, or good shot, but there was nothing memorable about the play. But to the individual involved in the play, there was a moment of intense pleasure in achieving a perfect outcome. Competition isn’t about beating the other guy. It’s about moments of raising your performance on some set of intricate skills to highest level you can achieve.  

Golf is a terrible game for me. It demands such precision, such repeatability. A swing that hits the ball a few millimeters off-centre results in a failure. A minor error results in a spin on the ball and it drifts off target and gets you in trouble. You can’t run faster or work harder if you’re golf game is suffering, so my go-to habit of trying to beat my opponents by will-power and diligent effort isn’t a winning strategy in golf. On a pretty good day I will make 90 shots, and something like 85 will range from mediocre to terrible. But those other five? Those will be perfect. And I love those bright moments of success.

Is competition good for the kids? In my opinion, absolutely. I do think it’s important that kids get to compete against kids of similar ability, because they need to be in situations where the opportunity for a successful play will naturally arise. But given that caveat, sports gives them a chance to feel good about themselves. At about six years of age, my daughter watched me throwing ground balls to her older brother in the back yard. She said, plaintively, “why don’t you do ground balls for me?” I said “I didn’t know you would want to do that”. (Yes, I suffered from gender bias – boys play baseball, girls do ballet. But I learned.) She said “I could do that” and within weeks she was an accomplished little infielder. Was it good for her? I think she felt that thrill of achievement when she was able to vacuum up ground balls like a pro. She joined a softball team and socialized with other girls. Not a star athlete (poor girl, she had my DNA to contend with), she gained entry into the athletic girls’ circles because she was good enough to contribute. And as an adult she joined co-ed softball teams and gained both an exercise outlet and a social outlet. 

Why would athletic competition not be good for kids? The answer is almost always the same thing. It isn’t the sport, and it isn’t the competition. It’s the adult. Often the parent, sometimes the coach, sometimes, lamentably, a “fan”. If there’s a problem with kids competing in sports, I will wager that I can trace that problem to an adult with an ego problem.

We have all seen that ugly hockey parent whose identity is “star player’s father or mother.” If your sense of self-worth is linked to either being a great athlete, or being the parent of a great athlete, then every loss in competition, every bad referee’s call, every poor coaching decision threatens you at a deep egocentric level. There are parents, coaches, fans and even referees who get absorbed in the game at an unhealthy level and for unhealthy reasons. To the parent who thinks their kid shouldn’t be subjected to the unhealthy atmosphere that goes with some levels of competition, I would say that it’s a matter of taking the good with the bad.

I think kids need the physical activity that comes with sports. I think they need to learn the social skills that come with good team sports. I think they deserve to feel the emotional reward of making a great play every now and again. If you cushion and protect your kid from all that’s bad in sports, you also deny them all that is good in sports. My advice – get involved in the sports organization and help deal with the ugly parent, the ugly fan. Get the right policies and culture in place so that your kid has the best possible sports outcome.

I have a friend who postulates that we aren’t helping our kids by dummying down the sharp edges of competition in our lives. We’re not doing our children any favours when they progress through school because we don’t have the guts to tell them that they’ve failed at grade three. If they haven’t mastered grade three material, they are likely going to suffer in grade four. School is a preparation for life’s competition – it’s trying to equip our children with the skills and knowledge to compete for a job, for money, for food on the table. And sporting interests are part of that training process. In good sports organizations, kids learn to contribute to a team, to celebrate victory and achievement, and to absorb loss and resolve to do the work to be better the next time. 

So now, what do the experts say? I looked at two countering opinions. First was an article in Psychology Today entitled “The Case for Removing Competition from Youth Sports”. He makes the statement that “the allure of competitive sports is a likely outgrowth of our primal need to display dominance….(and) culturally evolved signaling systems that serve a function similar to (biological) courtship rituals in other animals.” In his view, this reliance on physical dominance no longer plays a meaningful role in our evolutionary success, and so we should lower the importance we assign to it.

He then argues that sports competition creates winners and losers, and both labels are dangerous. “Students who lose a game or race may feel like a failure. They may be mistreated or ostracized for contributing to a loss. They may lose confidence in their ability to do other things besides sports.

On the other hand, winners are at risk of developing a superiority complex; they can become overconfident and believe they are better than other people.” He goes on to argue that “students should aim to make their future performance better than today’s performance: That is the only comparison that has merit…. Removal of the competition between individuals or teams—for example, by not keeping score or doling out trophies—preserves the most important benefits of youth sports: Kids have fun, get exercise, and learn to work together as a team.”

Ok, I have to confess that my gut reaction to that stuff was “what utter crap”, especially that bit about not keeping score or doling out trophies. I cannot imagine kids playing a game without wanting to know whether they are succeeding or not, and keeping score is simply a measure of success. 

As for not giving out trophies, I suppose that’s better than giving trophies to everyone. Remember when we gave out “participation” medals to all who participated in a baseball tournament? Kids see through that. My kids didn’t value those medals at all, because at a very early age they understood that there was no real achievement there and nothing in particular to celebrate. Winning is important because it helps establish a link between reward and effort. It is important for the coaches and parents to teach kids how to be magnanimous winners, but it is, nevertheless, important to celebrate winning. And quite honestly, I see nothing wrong with giving a trophy to an athlete or a team to celebrate winning.

The second I read was in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. It had a long and winding title – A systematic review of the psychological and social benefits of participation in sport for children and adolescents: informing development of a conceptual model of health through sport. A systematic review article in a scholarly journal is one in which the author tries to summarize the evidence from a number of studies and reach a “body of evidence” conclusion. 

That systematic review touched briefly on individual findings from a very large number of studies. Study findings included the following:

• after controlling for factors such as income, parents’ education, age and ethnicity, compared to no participation or participation in individual sports, participation in team sport had resulted in benefits such as lower social anxiety, lower social isolation, better social self-concept, and improved self-esteem.
• Shy children who participated in sport over a one-year period demonstrated a decrease in anxiety over time. Sport was associated with positive psychological and social outcomes, including higher positive affect and well-being and greater social skills.
• sports alone (and also in combination with other activities) were associated with significantly better health outcomes, including higher healthy self-image and lower risk of emotional distress, suicidal behaviour and substance abuse.

After reviewing and often quoting the individual findings of a number of papers, the systematic review came to conclusions. Other than the conclusion that further studies might be a good idea, the conclusions are best summarized thusly: “there is a general consensus that participation in sport for children and adolescence is associated with improved psychological and social health, above and beyond other forms of leisure-time physical activity.”

So, despite the opinion of the psychologist who wrote article one, the systematic review in article two says that by and large, sports are good for kids. To the parent who says she doesn’t want her kids competing because it’s bad for them, I would say “do your homework.”No, we can’t take competition out of sports, and no, we shouldn’t try. Your kids can’t ever go “Yay, I did it” if they never try. Your job as a parent is not to cushion your child against disappointment from a sports loss. Your job is to teach them how to deal with disappointment on the one hand and with triumph on the other. And there is no better venue for that learning at a young age than the sporting arena.