Win all your games at a weekend youth rugby festival but no trophy? Surely not!
A short but sardonic rant about the RFU's well-meaning motives to enforce its ‘Core Values' by Dan Nethercott, Sedgley Park Rugby Club Under 11s Coach!
The RFU’s ideal of promoting the ‘Kids First’ pledge to the game for 6 to 13 year olds is surely beyond criticism. Who could genuinely decry the lofty maxims of ‘putting the children at the heart of what we do’, or ‘developing children’s confidence and character as players and people’? A glance at the RFU website that expounds these values is full of positive messages and aims. (And as a side benefit, it certainly leaves you in no doubt as to who might be the best company to manage your wealth and investments.) But below the impeccable surface lies much more complexity. After all these are ethical principles. The problem with ethics is that of absolutes as applied to abstracts. What really are the core values of Teamwork, Respect, Enjoyment, Discipline and Sportsmanship? Maybe they fit under the banner of ‘I know it when I see it’ rather than definable characteristics. Like many ethical precepts, they can also exist in tension; for example, most people understand that at times being undisciplined can also be enjoyable.
A problem that arises when supporting these core values is what to do about the thorny matter of WINNING. Is there a sport that doesn’t have a format to somehow keep score? Sport feels heavily entwined with the ultimate result of the game. Without a result then does the effort, teamwork, sportsmanship and drama not simply evaporate? The result rarely matters in real human terms, but without a result to aim at the things that do truly matter such as the core values are greatly diminished. Would we be glad to watch our kids play with no regard whatsoever to the score? Why would they try to play well if it had no meaning at all to score a try or stop the opposition? Isn’t not trying to win at all somehow disrespectful – to your team, the other team, the game itself? Maybe there exists an ideal point at which they care enough to play well in the game and then stop being so bothered by the result as soon as the whistle blows.
All level-headed adults involved in the game know that winning can be over-valued at the cost of other, more important ethical goals. We have a spectre in our minds of the threatening and unfair coach whose behaviour strives to sacrifice the greater good for the trivial result. Reflective coaches fear that they might sometimes become that person. We know that winning has to be aimed for with integrity and wisdom. But the game has to be careful; when guarding against the problem of harmful attitudes to the score, it must not unwittingly demonise winning.
In its wisdom, therefore, the RFU had determined that the winning of trophies was not to be tolerated at the U11 age group and below anymore. This rule felt strange to me as a coach to the under 11s. Mainly through a lucky mixture of a group of talented kids, supportive parents and senior coaches, our team are good. They play well and they often win. When we went to the Southport Festival this year as under 11s it was to regain a title we had won at under 9s and under 10s. In those years they won a comically oversized, gold trophy they could barely lift that proudly sit in the display cabinet in the middle bar. Much joy was had those evenings. Perhaps when you are a winning team you are spared the psychological risk of not holding a trophy. Perhaps as a side that has won trophies, the Sedgley Park RUFC under 11s view on their merits is biased and irrelevant. Perhaps the utilitarian net value of trophies is questionable, and that, when seen from a wider perspective, they should be held until kids are more mature.
All plausible points of view, one could imagine. Harder to understand, however, is the notion that trophies are not really that dangerous after all. In fact trophies are just as desirable a reward as they ever were. Trophies CAN be handed out to some teams and not others without fear of long term damage to the young brain, but so long as they aren’t handed out for WINNING.
More inexplicable still, the proposal that rugby’s admirable Core Values of Teamwork, Respect, Enjoyment, Discipline, and Sportsmanship (TREDS) might be somehow measured and summated as a basis for the good kind of trophy rather than the bad kind. The underlying message of not having a trophy then becomes: your team wasn’t sporting enough, wasn’t respectful enough, that – astonishingly - you didn’t enjoy yourself enough to earn a prize. With the obviously impossible inference that this was all somehow witnessed, judged and recorded by a selection of people with – one can only assume for it to be legitimate – access to technology that measures a squad of 11 year old’s total enjoyment and teamwork. If we are going to evoke the danger of a trophy then certainly empirical comparisons and ranking must be carried out. If we are going to subject the non-trophy holding kids to such risk, we couldn't just make it all up, right?
Although the core values are of course commendable in guiding the way the game is played, coached and supported; the strange paradox in this approach is that winning itself is subconsciously punished. For what right-thinking TREDS-monitor would award the trophy to the team who have beaten all the others? We all know that the winners were much, more likely to have been badly coached than the losers. Don’t we?
With the prospect of the unpardonable crime of winning all of their matches (and aware that such a result would mean the TREDS-trophy could never be awarded) coaching staff and supporters scrambled to develop a trophy worthy of the weekend. Roadside assembly of a glass jug from the supermarket, gold spray from B&Q and some cut-up cloths near enough to the pink and blue kit to be acceptable, and a trophy emerged: A traditional, results-based trophy to hold high and cheer.
Oh, and just for the record, the SP U10s (another team to watch out for) won all but one of their group games and equally came away with nothing - not even the chance of a final.
TREDS is intrinsic to the game - our SP Minis teams show this every week - but they can also learn that you can be proud when you win and still be a good sportsman.
Dan Nethercott
U11s Coach