"We're losers. We got beat. There is no trophy for us."

Ours is a case by case basis. We had a 3rd place state trophy in baseball that I was very proud of.

We also had a 9th place local tourney where we were awful all game. Our son and I agreed to quietly accept it and we threw it away at the gas station.

Today I was incredibly proud of our 1-2. Girls are getting better and better.

 

Every juco basketball program I've covered has sponsored an eight-team tournament. None of them have conducted a seventh-place game.

 

When I was watching the video, I was also thinking, "Wait, isn't Maryland good too?" And so I looked it up. Maryland's No. 5 and Louisville's No. 7 in the latest AP D-1 women's poll. I think he's just throwing a temper tantrum because his team laid an egg in a fairly high-stakes (for pre-Christmas) game. Simmer down now.

Besides, if he was trying to top Kevin Borseth, he fell miserably short.

Note: Borseth, who went back to mid-major titan UW-Green Bay of his own accord after a spell at Michigan, is by most accounts a really earnest and likeable guy who just gets wound up from time to time. Like Tom Izzo, he's from the U.P. (in fact, he's somehow from a more remote part of the UP than Izzo is). Broke in at the D-2 school I covered for 7 years and the stories were many and normally humorous.

 

My first question upon watching Borseth was if all the Michigan ladies fit into their locker stalls that night, or just the guards.

 

"... long before any millennials shit between two shoes..."

I have a new phrase to add to my repertoire... never heard that expression before.

 

I covered Borseth a long time ago in his earlier stops. Great great guy to talk about women's basketball with.

 

I get Walz's sentiment, even if I wish he'd lay it out in better terms - and then back it up with actions.

I do believe, among athletes, there has built up a slight entitlement of just being a good athlete, and what comes with that, rather than accomplishing much of anything - that just getting the scholarship, and the attention that comes with it, is a kind of status and achievement that shields you from, I dunno, failing really. You might lose but you don't fail. You've been told, so many times, how few people can do what you're doing that, that it kind of alienates you from rock bottom. Especially when you get all the gear, the special dorms, etc.

That hits hardest at the college level. When you've played however many hundreds of games over the previous summers, the thing loses its appeal, to some degree, and what really loses its appeal is learning how to battle for playing time when it doesn't come right away. College coaches have no disciplinary tools to fall back on. The kids just leave, or they retreat into their cocoons of plush locker rooms or athlete perks.

And then there are the parents who basically embody the "my job is to tell my kid he or she is great because life is competition and I want them to have confidence and an ego and win perhaps maybe so I can feel good about my parenting skills to offset the resentment I feel about my own Baby Boomer parents who didn't give much of a shit."

There may be some of that.

It's an America full of people at this point wanting to say "I matter."

 

I've never met the guy, but all the people who worked with him when he was there had positive things to say about him. Basically sounds like a women's basketball version of Izzo, which makes sense because their hometowns are about two hours apart on US-2.

 

That's an interesting take, but doesn't that mean he's really railing against actual trophies? The participation trophies thing is cute and strawman-y, but lets face it, the girls he recruits don't get participation trophies. They won. All the time, all the way up. That's part of the reason they got to a top-flight program.

It also cuts to one of the core contradictions lower-level athletics. Athletes are often heavily rewarded for things they can't control and things that often come easy to them. Basically, if life is a competition, they've spent 18 years having an edge. And people told them they "worked hard," but no one got through to them how much harder they'd have to work in college.

It is a cute tantrum, one a lot of folks well glom onto because everyone likes shitting on folks younger than them because it's a great and easy way to feel wonderfully smug.

 

There probably isn't a single player on Walz's roster who wasn't all-state in high school. You don't get to be all-state by picking up 7th-place participation trophies.

And any who weren't all-state probably (almost certainly) got recruited because they knocked somebody's socks off on AAU or during drills at camps, etc etc. At any rate they didn't (or certainly shouldn't have) get scholarships for finishing seventh.

 

Silver and bronze medals! Rewarding losers since 1896! Sad!

 

It's really getting to be a tired cliche.

Yes, participation trophies for high school kids is absurd, but MVPs, all stars and national championships for 8-year-olds are equally ridiculous.

The other thing is that kids are playing organized sports at an earlier age than they once did. A generation or two ago, Little League didn't even start until kids were 9.