Co-operation or competition?

[Wowbagger]

This topic has emerged in another thread.

Some years ago there was a move in some areas/local authorities to get rid of competitive sports.

Having been in teaching for an awful long time, I always regarded competition as a refined form of co-operation. If you are trying to win a competition in which the opponent doesn't care, neither side gets any fun out of it. Also when someone uses an irregularity of the rules to circumvent the objective of the game (see Olympic Badminton), that ruins things

A really hard-fought battle in which you emerge as the victor is the most satisfying result, but losing a hard-fought contest in which your opponent has to play well to beat you can also give satisfaction. One memorable game I played a few years ago was against World u21 Women's Champion Harriet Hunt. She won, of course, but I gave her a run for her money in a long game which attracted quite a crowd at the end. That was quite satisfying.

Of course, there's no place for gloating when you do win well. Being cock-a-hoop can be counter-productive. I remember once hearing from a third party that my opponent in a particular game had been upset by my attitude and I was mortified.

My old pal (sadly deceased) David Raeburn, who was British Boys' Champion in 1934, summed it up very well once after he beat me to take the Southed Chess Club Championship in a game I should have won but buggered up. He could tell how upset I was (cross with myself would be a more precise description) and he said "I think I'm going to give up chess. I hate it when I lose and I don't like it when I win."

[Kim]

Of course, there's no place for gloating when you do win well. Being cock-a-hoop can be counter-productive.

This is what it's about.  It's perceived to be easier to make everyone a winner than to prevent the winners from gloating and making life generally unpleasant for the losers.  Especially in school type situations where there's always going to be a range of ability and interest.

In my day there were moves in the right direction.  Running events, for example, were about improvements in your times over the term, rather than your absolute time.  Similarly with gymnastics type stuff.  The extremely unfit and sufficiently devious were at a distinct advantage over the more athletically able by these criteria.

Team sports were still hell, of course.  Not so much because there was a winning team and a losing team, so much that the more interested/able members of the losing team would resent you for letting the side down by being inherently crap.  And resented by teenagers armed with mud and hockey sticks is not a pleasant thing to be.

But you'd have exactly the same problem in a purely cooperative game.  Who-can-keep-the-tennis-rally-going-the-longest, to pick an example I remember being spectacularly bad at.

[Pancho]

School competitive sport seems to be as much about bonding and developing team spirit as it is about winning and losing.

At my children's first school, practically every week had several forms of competitive event: inter-house, inter-school or regional; academic, sporting or music; individual or team. The result was a bunch of kids who were really proud of their school and house and the achievements of (all) its members. It was a very good outcome.

Of course, winning and losing did come into it and being taught to be resilient in defeat and magnanimous in victory were key messages. My eldest was always the absolute last in any track event but always got the biggest cheer and loudest support. Despite not having a sporting bone in her body, she loved the school and the sport.

Some years ago there was a move in some areas/local authorities to get rid of competitive sports.

Surely this is  a Daily Mail myth? Along with councils funding lesbian single mums support groups etc?

[Wowbagger]

...

Some years ago there was a move in some areas/local authorities to get rid of competitive sports.

Surely this is  a Daily Mail myth? Along with councils funding lesbian single mums support groups etc?

Quite possibly. It was reported in other places than the Mail though, otherwise I would not have been aware of it.

[Jacomus]

School competitive sport seems to be as much about bonding and developing team spirit as it is about winning and losing.

At my children's first school, practically every week had several forms of competitive event: inter-house, inter-school or regional; academic, sporting or music; individual or team. The result was a bunch of kids who were really proud of their school and house and the achievements of (all) its members. It was a very good outcome.

Of course, winning and losing did come into it and being taught to be resilient in defeat and magnanimous in victory were key messages. My eldest was always the absolute last in any track event but always got the biggest cheer and loudest support. Despite not having a sporting bone in her body, she loved the school and the sport.

Some years ago there was a move in some areas/local authorities to get rid of competitive sports.

Surely this is  a Daily Mail myth? Along with councils funding lesbian single mums support groups etc?

Absolutely, it is crucial for those in responsibility to teach magnanimity and resilience.

Part of what made me love team sport so much was the shared achievement of victory and the shared consolation of loss, with the determination to win next time.

[Kim]

Part of what made me love team sport so much was the shared achievement of victory and the shared consolation of loss, with the determination to win next time.

See, we didn't have that.  We had the shared resentment at the perceived cause of failure, and determination to make their lives hell until they magically developed speed/hand-eye coordination/sufficient social status to be allowed to be a bit crap at sport.

[John Henry]

Part of what made me love team sport so much was the shared achievement of victory and the shared consolation of loss, with the determination to win next time.

See, we didn't have that.  We had the shared resentment at the perceived cause of failure, and determination to make their lives hell until they magically developed speed/hand-eye coordination/sufficient social status to be allowed to be a bit crap at sport.

I can imagine what Jacomus is describing being the case once you're at a certain level. Unfortunately I never got near it, and my experiences chime with Kim's.

I was pisspoor at sports, especially (as coincidence would have it) the precise sports that my school deemed suitable for young gentlemen. I learned to deal with being able to lose at sport pretty young. Losing never bothered me, actually - I was good at other stuff, and I got the satisfaction of doing well and co-operating elsewhere.

Unfortunately my school decided that it would be 'character building' for me to have to undergo the same lesson in losing gracefully three times weekly for seven years. Even this didn't bother me. The derision, scorn and bullying of the other kids (and the PE teachers) did bother me, a lot.

I learned to associate sport - and therefore exercise, because at school there was no separation of the two concepts - with pain and humiliation. This is not untypical, I suspect, and possibly one reason for the horribly inactive lives a lot of people lead.

Fortunately I discovered cycling. One of the many great things about cycling is that pretty much anyone can achieve something special on a bike. As I did more, I discovered that I might be able to do things I'd never thought I was capable of. Thanks to cycling I discovered that I wasn't a dead loss, and I was able to put the demons of school sport behind me.

[arabella]

One of the schools I was at had what I always thought the good idea of putting the most useless runners in each house into a shuttle relay in 4 teams of 8 - there were 4 houses.  Just winner and runner up, but it meant half of the most useless runners actually got a PRIZE!!!! That was the one time I got a prize or running.  I doubt the faster folks even noticed the event took place though.

My sons' primary school spit into track (various running races) and field, with field getting points for achieving a standard. 

[andygates]

I used to hatehatehate competitive sports at school.  Hate. Hate! Because I was the Fat Kid and wasn't even good at shot putt. 

It took me until I got into triathlon many years later that I grasped the idea of competing against your own previous best.  The cooperative, genial atmosphere of a mass time-trial where the top ten were in a whole different game of their own - and where the bulk of the athletes were competing against the clock, no zero-sum bollocks that I was bound to lose.

I really wish I'd been given that at school. 

[LittleWheelsandBig]

I was 'the last kid picked' at school, couldn't run, couldn't catch and couldn't throw. I was useless at sport but didn't get into such a knicker-twist as some here.

The concept of 'dumbing down' competitions so that I could 'compete' annoyed the hell out of me and my fellow fatties. We wanted the races and other competitions to stay full-on, so that those who could perform well actually had to strive. My choice was to become a booknerd and eventually discovered cycling via a bike-obsessed high school teacher. Several years later I was trying to get on the national team (with little result).

My vote is for full-blooded competition.

[mcshroom]

In athletics we used to have the AAAs 5-star award scheme which was like a decathlon in that you got points for each event. I was immensely proud of my 3* in year 9

In the same way chess was as much about improving my grading as being the best at anything.

I was one of the average kids at school sport. Not a star in anything but competent enough to to enjoy most of the sports on offer.

[John Henry]

I was useless at sport but didn't get into such a knicker-twist as some here.

I didn't get into a 'knicker-twist', as you so sensitively and charmingly put it, because I was crap at sport. I got into a knicker-twist because I was bullied because of it. This was regarded as 'character building', because it was sport-related. If I'd behaved like that towards the kids who were crap at maths or whatever, I'd have been expelled.

My vote is for full-blooded competition.

My vote's for both. Push the bright kids with the additional maths and push the athletic kids with full-blooded competition. Separate the concepts of 'sport' and 'exercise' and teach the unathletic kids how to look after themselves in a fun way.

[Ham]

...

Some years ago there was a move in some areas/local authorities to get rid of competitive sports.

Surely this is  a Daily Mail myth? Along with councils funding lesbian single mums support groups etc?

Quite possibly. It was reported in other places than the Mail though, otherwise I would not have been aware of it.

Not a myth, fact. Newham for a while for sure, Barking & Dagenham, usual suspects. Not certain if it was only primary schools though.

[Wowbagger]

I was 'the last kid picked' at school, couldn't run, couldn't catch and couldn't throw. I was useless at sport but didn't get into such a knicker-twist as some here.

The concept of 'dumbing down' competitions so that I could 'compete' annoyed the hell out of me and my fellow fatties. We wanted the races and other competitions to stay full-on, so that those who could perform well actually had to strive. My choice was to become a booknerd and eventually discovered cycling via a bike-obsessed high school teacher. Several years later I was trying to get on the national team (with little result).

My vote is for full-blooded competition.

Competition doesn't work where one side doesn't care about the result or the imbalance in the abilities of the competitors means that there is no competition.

In many sports, rankings will give you a very good idea of who is likely to get a good game against whom, but of course there will be occasional exceptions.

In chess, which is possibly amongst the most predictable of games because the ranking system is so accurate, Arpad Elo formulated the World Ranking system and a result of his research was that there were 14 levels of player ability (level A being World Champion and Level N being raw beginner) where the expected results between players on adjacent levels would give the stronger player a 75% score. Two levels apart and  you could confidently predict in excess of a 90% score to the stronger player. Pair people 3 or more levels apart and the game was a foregone conclusion and therefore pointless.

I tried playing Go a few times. The rules are far simpler than chess but it's a much harder game in that there are something like 40 levels of complexity between raw beginner and world champion as outlined by Elo's successors' research. My laughable attempts at playing Go really did my head in. I can't get the hang of it at all.

I understand that computer games' ranking systems also use the Elo system.

[Pancho]

I was useless at sport but didn't get into such a knicker-twist as some here.

I didn't get into a 'knicker-twist', as you so sensitively and charmingly put it, because I was crap at sport. I got into a knicker-twist because I was bullied because of it. This was regarded as 'character building', because it was sport-related. If I'd behaved like that towards the kids who were crap at maths or whatever, I'd have been expelled.

But you describe crap teachers or a dysfunctional school culture rather than a problem inherent with competition. I don't believe kids are inherently bullies to the weaker - or rather, I believe that a good school culture will stop what is, yes, a natural tendency. And teaching people to be good winners and to support the weaker members is one of the tools to do this.

My vote is for full-blooded competition.

My vote's for both. Push the bright kids with the additional maths and push the athletic kids with full-blooded competition. Separate the concepts of 'sport' and 'exercise' and teach the unathletic kids how to look after themselves in a fun way.

[Karla]

My CV:
Football: completely awful
Rugby: okay.  I'd never in a million years make the squad and I was in the weaker half of the rest of the players, but I appreciated the fact that you didn't need so much skill if you were prepared to grab the ball, toss aside care for life and charge straight at the opposing players.  Okay, I was rubbish, but I was maybe a penultimate pick rather than a final pick.
Cricket: I didn't mind bowling, but couldn't do anything where someone else was throwing the ball at me.
General round-up: Pretty shocking.  You may have guessed that hand-eye co-ordination was bad and foot-eye co-ordination was worse.


One thing that hasn't really been said on here is that competitive sport can teach people about failure, and how to live with it.  How to lose a match and realise that it's not the end of the world, there'll always be another match next week.   You obviously don't want to teach people to become failures (well you do if you're an evil bastard Tory: keep those proles in their place ) but done properly, competitive sport can teach people how to fail well, which is a valuable life lesson.  They're going to fail at something in life, so they may as well get the lessn out of the way while it is still only a game.

Postscript: Higher up school I got into cross country running, at which I did okay and actually occasionally won stuff.  The wins were generally against all the other sporting cba types who didn't want to do football and weren't really racing: it was a bit like audax, really.

[John Henry]

I got into a knicker-twist because I was bullied because of it. This was regarded as 'character building', because it was sport-related. If I'd behaved like that towards the kids who were crap at maths or whatever, I'd have been expelled.

But you describe crap teachers or a dysfunctional school culture rather than a problem inherent with competition. I don't believe kids are inherently bullies to the weaker - or rather, I believe that a good school culture will stop what is, yes, a natural tendency. And teaching people to be good winners and to support the weaker members is one of the tools to do this.

Yes, that's a fair point. I went to a fairly traditional English public school with a very macho culture around sport and games, and that manifested itself as I describe - when I say I was bullied, I don't just mean by the other kids... But you're right, that's a cultural issue rather than being a necessary result of competition.

If I'm a little over-sensitive about this, it's because I don't want any child to have to go through what I did because some idiot adults get all nostalgic and rose-tinted about school sport and seek to replicate that kind of experience in the name of 'character building'. School sport as I suffered it was counter-productive and damaging for a whole load of people. I'm not anti-competition, but I think the first priority for school sport should be to make it a pleasant experience for everyone.

[Kim]

But you describe crap teachers or a dysfunctional school culture rather than a problem inherent with competition.

Indeed.  And these are the problems that some are seeking to resolve by removing the competitive element.  Which is why it won't work.

[Bledlow]

Apart from one loathsome PE teacher who was, for a year, my class teacher (I once got back at the bastard by correcting his spelling on my report - aged 13  ), the only part of school sport I really hated was rugby. That was partly because it was played in winter, therefore cold & muddy, & partly because I was small & thin & easily dumped in that cold mud. It wasn't too bad when I was allowed to play in a position where I could use my abilities at running & dodging (fast & agile skinny kid . . . ), such as the wing, but the aforesaid loathsome git was of the type who puts the smallest & weakest boys in the scrum "to make men of them".  Luckily I got away from him after that year.

Anything involving running, & where I didn't have to deal with balls flying through the air which I had to intercept (yeah, I was last pick for any cricket team, because I couldn't catch a ball to save my life), I quite enjoyed. Hockey, for example. I could cope with a ball which spent most of the time scooting along the ground.

The secret is in the culture. PE teachers who find what children are good at & encourage them to do it, please. Bullies who humiliate kids - sack the bastards. They shouldn't be allowed to teach.