Devoted Readers (all four of you), a story:
I began playing league softball in spring of 4th grade. Our town had Lassie League, an all-girls community league of teams named after Native American tribes. (How interesting that our middle-upper class Connecticut suburb named sports teams after those nice Native American folks. Celebrating diversity in a place that had none! Future story awaits.) Anyway, lucky for me, my best friend Laura and I ended up on Cherokee together. It was our first year of the organized sport, so our coaches had us split the (fake) position of shortfield, the (imagined) spot between first and second base. There wasn't a whole lot of action there, so it was a good (fake) position for beginners. Laura usually played four innings and I struggled through three. My friend took to the game quickly, and by the next year, she was playing shortstop on our new team, Sioux. I, on the other hand, was bumbling, awkward, and inconsistent. I hoped to deflect negative opinion of me by working the team with funny bits and stupid impersonation voices, and generally, I got teammates to laugh.
A score is a score, dear readers. This lesson has stayed with me my entire life.
At the end of the season, our coaches took the team to some fun spot like Playland. We ate junk food, threatened to vomit on each other on the roller coaster, and lost money trying to win cheap toys by playing cheap games. The day was good, but then came the cookout and the official awards ceremony.
OH BOY! I was bursting for my award. I knew it would be great.
Everyone got one.
Julie Johnson was MVP. (Duh.)
I'm pretty sure Laura took Best Back-up.
The coaches went through our entire roster and gave out softball-related awards:
Most Home Runs
Best Fielder
Best Pitcher
Most RBIs
Most Improved
Best Arm
And finally, they got to me. My award?
Friendliest.
Friendliest.
Actually, the bright gold foil paper medallion says "FRIENDLIEST!" (exclamation point). I still have the ribbon; it's here to my right, tacked up in the computer armoire, so I'm being exact. Check it out for yourself. I just figured out how to add a photo to my blog post.
Now, I have always been someone who believes that leveling the field and taking away all sense of competition is a bad idea. There are winners and losers in life. There are. Sometimes I've been really blessed to be a winner, but more often, I've been blessed to be a loser. Losing has taught me far more than winning has. Yay for losing!
So, what are we doing to children, pretending that life is fair and equal? What kind of fall are we setting them up for if we always allow them to win? Shouldn't we teach them that sometimes there's no award? Sometimes you just don't deserve it. You didn't earn it. Nope.
I had no business getting an award for softball. Shouldn't my coaches have left it at that and left me empty-handed?
And yet, here's the fish-smack. I didn't get an award for softball. My coaches highlighted something else about me that day. I was a loser at softball, but that didn't mean I had to be a loser.
I am firmly committed to this idea that not everyone gets to win all of the time, but I am so grateful that my softball coaches let everyone win that day. At the time, I really thought that FRIENDLIEST! was a great award. By God, I WAS FRIENDLIEST! I was a mediocre-at-best softball player, but who cares? In the big game of life, I got an award that would take me a lot farther than lame ol' Best Arm. So, even though I was a loser, I didn't feel like one that day, and it was a great thing.
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