The Sports Factor

Is it really about how you play the game, or is it simply about winning and losing? And should children specifically who play sport, be rewarded with trophies just because they participate?

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Now to move from the broadly political to the more specifically personal, but to look at another fundamental question in sport.

Is it really about how you play the game, or is it simply about winning and losing? And should children specifically who play sport, be rewarded with trophies just because they participate?

Now my next guest, Professor Leonard Zaichkowsky from Boston University, controversially argues that the proliferation of participation trophies, is actually a mixed blessing.

And while he acknowledges it's good, even important, to raise kids' self esteem, he contends it needs to be balanced with the importance of being able to take criticism, to experience failure, and to learn that in competition there are winners and losers.

Leonard Zaichkowsky: Kids really know when they deserve something for outstanding achievement, and they really don't put much value on something they get simply for participation.

Mick O'Regan: That's interesting, because a quote that I have in an interview that you did for The Boston Globe newspaper obviously in Boston, talked about the need to teach kids to be mentally tough, to learn to take criticism, and also to experience failure. Do you think that the proliferation of participation trophies works against those things?

Leonard Zaichkowsky: Well it's part of the feel-good movement that everything that we do with our children has to be positive, and yes, I think that there's going to be kind of a power shift, if you will, so we have more positive developments with the child than negative, and the answer is probably Yes. But for sure, children going through life are always going to experience something, a lack of success. They know when they haven't done well, and simply saying 'Son', or 'Daughter', 'you did really well', when they know full well that whether it was a school activity or sport activity, they didn't do well. So we're giving them false feedback in essence. That's really what's happening with trophies, that we're giving them false feedback for success, something they haven't really earned.

Mick O'Regan: And yet the mantra for generations, at least here in Australia, has been the familiar line that it's not about winning or losing, it's about how you play the game, that in that way that sport provides opportunity to be a gracious winner, or a good loser, or to understand that you can never cheat, and basically to give you some sort of moral education. Is that the most important element, and is that in a way what the trophies might be rewarding?

Leonard Zaichkowsky: Indeed, Mick. I think that sport has the capacity to teach many of the virtues in life, but it also has the capacity to teach all of the ills in life as well. And that really comes down to the leadership that the children get as they're involved in sport, both leadership at home, how their parents raised them to behave while they're playing sport, and how to behave away from sport. And the leaders that they have within sport, the volunteer coaches many times, they have the opportunity, this incredible opportunity to teach good fair play, sportsmanship, but they also have the capacity, and they do this, to teach cheating, and all of the ills of sport. So we hear that quite frequently and that's most unfortunate.

Mick O'Regan: Do you think, Professor Zaichkowsky, that in the period that you've been studying and researching these issues, that there's been a change, say, in the way that parents look at their children's sporting careers, if we can call it that, or look at their children's sporting participation? Are parents becoming less affirming and more critical, or more demanding of success?

Leonard Zaichkowsky: For sure it's the latter. The more demanding. I think there was a time where we could say in generations for example in the early immigrants arriving in North America and also in this country, it was around hard work, and they just didn't have time for sport, and all the leisure activities. But what's happened over time is that sport has become more and more an important part of our culture, certainly in North America, and I see it happening here in Australia as well, that youth sport is becoming really high stakes. What I mean by that is that now parents see this as - it's an investment in their child, and not so much the investment of the things we've been talking about, the opportunity to develop virtues, but rather it's the cost of an education.

Now it's going to probably happen here in Australia, but for sure it's happening in the United States where youngsters, if they're gifted in sport, and that's if their parents feel like they're making this contribution and push them into sport, they're going to really get good, and what this is going to get me from an investment standpoint is a child who's going to get High School education paid for at a good private High School, and then from there, they're going to continue the success and they're going to get a free education at a private university, like a Boston University, where I believe next year the tuition and room and board will be $50,000 a year. That's all paid for by the University if this young man or woman is a great athlete. And that's all over the United States.

Mick O'Regan: But am I right in thinking that the students have to actually pass the other non-sporting subjects that they take? You can't simply go through being a great fullback in the football team, or a great hockey player, you still have to pass the set subjects to maintain the scholarship?

Leonard Zaichkowsky: Oh, for sure, yes. They need their academic standards that they have to achieve, and it varies by university, and the significance of that university. For example, the standards at Harvard or Princeton University would probably be a little higher than a smaller State school. So there is a university for everybody where they can get their academic degree, and the opportunity to play sport.

Mick O'Regan: Now this leads me to another area of your research that I'm interested in speaking with you about, and that is how professional athletes actually approach winning and losing, and whether it's fundamentally different to the rest of us. Because I understand that you've done some work using MRI, brain imaging, with Hap Davis, a Canadian sports researcher, looking at the way in which people's brains functioned when they lost. Can you elaborate on that?

Leonard Zaichkowsky: Let me just kind of give you a background on it. Thanks for asking that question Mick. Dr Davis, who is a psychologist for the Canadian national swim team, for about 10 years, and he noticed after the last Olympics that those who failed from their perspective to either make the team, or didn't accomplish their personal best, they became depressed, and as a clinical psychologist he said, 'You know, it's clear to me that they were clinically depressed.' Then about the same time some of the leading neuroscientists in the world were publishing research on what the brain looked like with depressed people.

And his question was 'Well I wonder if athletes who have failed, will show similar effects in the brain when they're depressed?' and sure enough, when they viewed videotape, and of course we have videotape on every competition they've been involved in, and when they failed at the Olympics their brain lit up the different parts of the brain, in the hippocampal area for example, that looked just like a depressed patient might look like. So that led to that whole body of research where we looked at success and failure of Olympians, and demonstrated unequivocally that Yes, when they fail, their brain looks like a depressed individual. But they can be quickly taken out of that, with a quick intervention.

Mick O'Regan: What sort of intervention would that be?

Leonard Zaichkowsky: Well the intervention, we're trying several different things. One is what we call a quick 10-minute cognitive behavioural intervention, where basically they look at what caused the failure, they've got to snap out of that sad feeling that they have right now, and rehearse the really positive swimming events, where they really did their personal best, they switch into that mode of thinking. And feel very positive about the next competition that's coming up in the next hour or two. But they also now know what corrective action to take, whether it was the bad turn, or the mechanics were slightly off, so it's that quick intervention, but making them feel good about themselves.

And when they go back into the scanner, the FMRI scanner, the brain takes on a very different picture. So that's what we discovered in that study. And towards the end of April, we're going to do a series of studies at Boston University, continuing with this work with university elite athletes, continuing with this question of what happens in the human brain when they experience success and when they experience failure.

Mick O'Regan: Well that's something that we'll look forward to speaking with you about. And just to finish this conversation and I suppose to bring it back to where we began, when parents deal with children who've failed on the sporting field, who've lost a game, particularly say, kids that have got through to a Grand Final and they lose. From your research, what's the most useful way a parent can approach talking with a child who's just experienced sporting failure?

Leonard Zaichkowsky: One of the recommendations I give Mick to parents, is to usually avoid commenting on their performance for 24 hours after a contest. Because parents naturally want to be a little bit critical, they feel they know all the coaching behaviours that are necessary to make their child better at it. They want their child to succeed. But in the case of experiencing loss, right after a competition, that can be a very lonely moment, but what you have to do is be encouraging in support, and without giving them any false feedback, 'Son', or 'Daughter', 'you played a good game.

You gave it your best shot. That's how we saw it.' And hopefully it's not one of those really critical incidents where that particular play missed shot, or whatever, cost them the game. Those are really particularly tough ones, because you can't - in that case you'd be giving false feedback, 'It wasn't your fault, son', 'It wasn't your fault, daughter', because the child knows better. So it is a really delicate situation and it depends upon the context.

Mick O'Regan: So you really do need to acknowledge that the child's own understanding of the situation, not to patronise them, not to pretend something bad didn't happen when they're quite aware that it did.

Leonard Zaichkowsky: Yes, you're absolutely right, yes. They know and we're not going to be pulling something over their eyes that didn't happen.

Mick O'Regan: Professor Leonard Zaichkowsky, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to The Sports Factor here on ABC Radio National.

Leonard Zaichkowsky: That was my pleasure, Mick. Thank you for having me on.

Mick O'Regan: And Professor Zaichkowsky is in Australia as a guest of the Australian College of Physical Education.

That's our program for this week. Thanks, as always to the team: producer Andrew Davies, technical maestro Peter McMurray and to our agent in the archives, Sabrina Lipovic.

Guests

Professor Leonard Zaichkowsky
Specialist in sports psychology at Boston University.

Presenter

Mick O'Regan

Producer

Andrew Davies