It's your senior year of college. The last year you are able to play the sport you love and the sport you've been playing for potentially the last 12 years of your life. Your team has made it to the National Championship. You're in the title match/game and have the opportunity to bring home a national championship for your school. You guys pull through and win the title. The countless hours spent in the gym, on the courts or lanes, have paid off. Your team has won the ultimate prize. You couldn't have asked for a better ending. Now think about this. What if every team that was competing for the national championship got the same trophy you got. How would you feel? You could have lost and still gotten the same trophy? What about all the hard work you put in? It now feels as though it doesn't matter. What's the point?

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the participation trophy. Whether it is from a sport or sometimes even in a work environment, this is something I feel is hurting people now, and will hurt the generations to come. The participation trophy is something that I feel is diminishing the work ethic of both adults and children alike.. When small children are playing things like t-ball, they do not necessarily have the attention span to completely play the game or they may not completely understand what is happening. I understand the participation trophy in this case. Although I do not know what the age cut off should be, I do believe that at a certain age the participation trophy should stop.

As we grow up and the sports we participate in become more competitive, it is important to teach young athletes that to succeed, you need to work hard. Like anything in life, you have to work for what you want. Everything is not handed to you on a silver platter. If we start to continue to give participation trophies, people will think they will not have work for it. For example, at bowling tournaments, only the top teams get trophies. If we start to give everyone who went to the tournament a trophy, they will no longer work to get the highest scores. The team who wins will now feel it does not matter what they scored, everyone got a trophy anyway.

Overtime, people will no longer try to be good at something they love. No matter how much harder they work to get the results they want, they will essentially be equal to the people who do not try to get results. With participation trophies, the end result would be the same. Why should someone spend countless hours working their butts off when someone else will put no time in, and in the end, they will both have a trophy or a prize? It's not fair, and no life isn't fair. But things don't have to be this way. No one is entitled to a trophy because they play the sport. Hard work, dedication, passion, and results deserve a trophy. We should be rewarded for good work ethic and results, not laziness and expectations.

We should be teaching the younger generations and everyone that hard work is important in all aspects in life.