Participation trophies aren't the problem.....participation is.

This is a different focus from my usual posts. We live in a very divided world, but I hope we can all agree that more kids playing team sports is a good thing. I’m not talking about competing or making Olympic teams, but in an increasingly online world, one where childhood obesity and depression continue to increase across many countries, having kids play a team sport – almost ANY sport – is good for physical, mental, and social well-being and growth. If you disagree with this so far, please stop reading…..but if you are nodding along with the premise, you should also be worried that in the US (and many other countries) over the last 20 years, participation in team sports by kids aged 6 – 17 has continued to drop almost every year. Yes, there is some re-balancing towards individual sports like tennis, climbing or golf, but these are significantly outweighed by the reduction in team sports participation. According to the Aspen Institute, 38% of kids aged 6-12 play any type of organized sport….down from 45% just 10 years earlier. And that number is continuing to fall - the COVID pandemic has made things worse and this decrease is disproportionally impacting lower-income households, and black or Hispanic kids. 

In addition to wanting kids to participate for their own health, we all want to increase the standard of our country’s sporting performance. I want the US to win the soccer world cup in my lifetime (hey, stop laughing!!!) and if you are a sports fan, you want the same for the Olympics or whatever global event you are interested in. Increased participation at the grass roots level increases your country’s chances of finding the next basketball or gymnastics star. Limiting this participation to smaller and smaller percentages of the population decreases your chances of being world class, even if it increases the chances of your kid making an elite team. 

There is not one solution to this. I’m not sure banning participation trophies (which some US districts have done) is really the primary root cause. But I am guessing that a number of sports related factors have led to this (beyond the social media, video gaming, etc.) – rapid increase in competitive sports at younger and younger age levels…..insane parents and coaches…..pressure for kids to focus on one sport year-round….increased value of college sports scholarships….none of which are simple or easy to solve. One empirical data point – I coached travel soccer for all three of my kids (2 boys, 1 girl). They all tried out and made the under 8’s ‘elite’ soccer team in my hometown which is a highly competitive, upper-middle class area of NJ. One of these teams was elite and won the North Jersey state U8 competition….one of the others went 0-10 their first season. Each of the squads were 12 kids, so 36 in all…..and I tracked them through high school!!  Only 5 of the 36 played for their high school soccer team…..and only one played in college. The rest of them went on to many things – one is on the US ski team, three went to college on lacrosse scholarships, one was a nationally ranked quarterback, one was the #1 wrestler in NJ. Not all of them sports – four were in the school marching band, three were leads in the school musical…you get the idea. At the age of 8 or 9, competitive soccer was being pushed as a year-round sport with travel tournaments and personal training. But we failed in developing and growing the love of soccer that would last even 10 years to the end of high school.  

So why is this on LinkedIn and what is the connection to work? Well, beyond the fact that I found this interesting and a topic I have a lot of passion for (and if you are still reading this far down, I assume you do too!!), there is also a implication to corporate DEI programs. We invest a lot of time/money in short-term DEI programs (mentoring, hiring practices, affinity groups, learning & development, etc.) – these are all critical. But they are sometimes focused to the detriment of the longer-term focus – we will increase the performance of whatever industry you care about (for me it is life sciences) by increasing the participation rates across all dimensions of diversity in entry-level roles and folks leaving schools and colleges. This is true in every country. But this does not fit neatly on our annual goals and objectives – in fact, we will probably be in a new job/company/retirement by the time we see this change in a material way. It also requires us to invest at the industry level rather than at an individual company or function level, which is where most of the investment goes now. If your entire focus as a manager is answering “how can I change the DEI scorecard for my division in the next 12 months?”, then you will naturally focus on hiring, retaining and other very tangible short-term programs. My challenge to all of us is to complement these short-term efforts with an equal number of longer-term investments that will outlive our goals and scorecard, outlive our own management lifecycles, and elevate the performance of the entire industry, not just our individual company.