There was a time when simply being competitive was considered a compliment. You played hard, wanted to win, tested yourself against others, and learned something about yourself in the process. Contrast that to today, where competition increasingly seems to come with another requirement: You need to be the best.
Sports culture is saturated with rankings. Who is the #1 recruit? What is the best travel team? Who has the highest rating? Which program sends the most athletes to college? What are the odds of making varsity, earning a scholarship, or playing professionally? We even nationally rank athletes who haven’t reached puberty. When kids regularly experience mental health concerns around anxiety and depression as a result of constant pressure to be the best, is it time to re-calibrate the youth sport experience?
Competition & growth
Certainly, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be the best. Competition can motivate people to work harder, prepare more effectively, and discover abilities they didn’t know they possessed. Winning definitely matters. And striving for excellence can be tremendously rewarding. But has our obsession with identifying who is best begun to overshadow everything else competition is supposed to provide?
For generations, sports have taught lessons that have very little to do with finishing first. Athletes learn to work with teammates, accept coaching, manage frustration, fulfill commitments, respect opponents, and persevere when things aren’t going well. They also learn something increasingly difficult to accept in our success-obsessed culture: Sometimes someone else is better than you. That’s not a flaw in competition, but instead one of its greatest lessons.
The problem with constantly ranking and evaluating young athletes is that social comparison can gradually replace personal growth as the definition of success.
- Instead of asking, Am I getting better? we ask, Am I better than him?
- Instead of, Did our team improve? it becomes, Where are we ranked?
- Instead of, Does my child love playing soccer? we wonder, Is he playing on the best team where he will get the most looks from college coaches?
There is also a psychological price to living under constant evaluation. For young athletes, every game, tryout, ranking, statistic, social-media post, and recruiting list can become another opportunity to measure their worth against someone else’s. When success becomes synonymous with being exceptional, simply being good can begin to feel like failure. Herein is where many mental health issues begin, specifically with anxiety that often accompanies efforts to not just be good — but be the best.
A child who once worried about striking out may now worry about falling behind, losing a starting position, dropping in a ranking, disappointing parents, or jeopardizing some imagined future opportunity. Sports, which can be an extraordinary outlet for stress, can instead become another source of it.
Final thoughts
Healthy competition teaches perseverance precisely because sometimes we lose. It teaches humility because someone may be better. It teaches resilience because things don’t always go our way. And it teaches respect because our opponent isn’t an obstacle to the experience — the opponent makes the experience possible. When kids are taught these things, competition generally improves their mental health rather than creates mental health problems.
None of this means we should stop keeping score, eliminate rankings, or discourage kids from dreaming about being the best. Competition without the desire to win isn’t really competition. But winning should be part of the experience, not the only thing that validates it. Maybe the lesson young athletes need isn’t that being #1 doesn’t matter, it’s that they don’t have to be the best for competition to bring out the best in them.
drstankovich.com
