True competition: a guide to pursuing excellence in sport and society

David L. Shields and Brenda L. Bredemeier, 2009

Champaign, IL, Human Kinetics

$29.00 (pbk), 238 pp.

ISBN 978‐0‐7360‐742‐9

Over the past 100 years, moral educators have expressed ambivalence about the value of competition. Emile Durkhiem (1925/1973) found that competition had both positive and negative implications for society. On the positive side, competition opened up possibilities for everyone to advance in their station of life and stimulated progress, innovation and efficiency. On the negative side, he pointed out there are few cultural forces to check individuals’ desires for personal gain and advantage. Without the constraint of self‐discipline based on rules or laws, nothing stands in the way of personal ambition and the pursuit of success.

In sports, we describe the negative pursuit of success as a ‘win at all costs’ mentality. It is tempting to see the roots of this mentality in competition itself but to do so would be to miss Durkheim’s point. The problem is not competition per se but competition without effective regulation. Durkheim foresaw that as our culture became more secularised and individualised we would have to find a new basis for social solidarity and respect for the common good.

In other words, competition itself can bring about considerable personal and social benefits as long as it is embedded within a supportive cultural context. Shields and Bredemeier present an insightful defence of the value of competition under such conditions. They distinguish competition as understood ideally, ‘true competition’, from competition as it gets corrupted in adverse cultural conditions, ‘de‐competition’.

Their positive understanding of competition may come as a surprise to many educators, who see competition at the root of many evils in the classroom (e.g. Kohn, 1992). For example, educational psychologists have for some time decried the ill effects of competitive classroom grading practices (e.g. Nicholls, 1989; Covington, 1992). Grading on a curve can have devastating effects on students at the low end and can undermine the intrinsic motivation of all. It would appear that in most classroom situations, students would be better served by teaching practices that emphasise cooperation, mastery and progress toward individualised goals.

Shields and Bredemeier agree that competition can be misused to assess student achievement and motivate student performance. Focusing on sports, they argue that competition is actually a highly cooperative activity. The rules of sport are constitutive of the sport itself. Take away the rules and there is no game. For example, in basketball you can advance the ball only by dribbling with one hand or passing. The competitive fun of the game depends upon everyone playing by these rules.

Cheaters are not competitors or lovers of the game they pretend to play. Cheaters are unfair and cowardly. They do not accept the challenge of playing by the rules that constitute the game and that their opponents are playing by. They do not understand what winning is all about because they do not have respect for their opponents, the game or themselves.

Shields and Bredemeier show that competition is a normative concept in the sense that one is not really competing if one is not playing fairly. In retrieving the primacy of justice for competition, they go so far as to claim that truly competitive sports can actually foster moral development. So little attention is given to cultivating a sense of fairness or even basic civility in sports today that the proposition that sports build character seems anachronistic. Many prefer to think of sports as a ‘test’ of character. Shields and Bredemeier challenge moral educators to think of sports, particularly youth sports, as a crucible for character.

Those who study youth sports would be well served to return to Piaget (1932/1965), who used children’s competitive games to study the genesis of children’s morality. Piaget did not view competition as a threat to morality but as a context in which children could develop an understanding of the importance of rules. Piaget took for granted that competitive games were fun. He observed that as children become more adept at changing the rules through democratic procedures, they did so in order to promote fairness and everyone’s enjoyment. Focusing on child development, Piaget did not address Durkheim’s concerns about individualism in relationship to the weakening of social solidarity in the wider society. Piaget was confident that under conditions of equality, children would develop a morality of cooperation and reciprocity.

Do youth sports today provide the conditions of equality essential for children’s moral development? Anyone familiar with contemporary organised youth sports would have to conclude, ‘no’. Adult coaches and parents so dominate practices and games that children are left without any meaningful control. How different organised youth sports are from the marble games that Piaget found so important for moral development. In organised youth sports children are not only told what to do, but are often forced to sit on the bench.

Shields and Bredemeier advocate a revolution in youth sports by arguing for the necessity of giving the sports back to the children. They also provide very concrete suggestions for helping children to compete in ways that are fun and fair. Leaders of youth sports organisations ought to take heed. Too many children are being sacrificed on the altar of adults’ unrealised ambitions for success in sports.

In describing the phenomenon of ‘de‐competition’, Shields and Bredemeier shed a moral light on the excesses of a culture obsessed with personal gain. Durkheim was right all along. A competitive ethos works for a society and for individuals only in a culture that values the common good. Those who love sports and love to compete will recognise that True competition is one of the most important books written about sports in last 25 years. But True competition is not just a book about sports. It is a book about character and culture and how we, as members of a human community, can live and work together in justice and peace.

© 2010, F. Clark Power