Once again, one of the great poxes in sports has slithered its way into the general public consciousness. It is a bane on athletics so horrid, its discussion should then be followed by its swift elimination.
That scourge? Participation trophies.
That's one of the things Louisville women's basketball coach Jeff Walz had on his mind following his Cardinals' recent loss to Maryland in a battle of top-10 teams. He was asked how his team can play better late in games, and said players needed to have a will to do so - and that those hideous baubles for participating are part of the problem.
"Right now the generation of kids that are coming through, everybody gets a damn trophy, OK?" Walz said. "You finish last, you come home with a trophy. You kidding me? I mean, what's that teaching kids? It's okay to lose. And unfortunately, it's our society. It's what we're building for."
This has been a familiar refrain with coaches and pundits nationwide for ages. And those lamentations will continue, though I'd like to set a couple of limits.
First, if you're a coach whose contract includes a "retention bonus" (i.e., you're still in your current job, so here's some money) you don't get to complain about participation trophies.
Also, if you're a college football coach whose team qualifies for a bowl game with a 5-7 record, you are forbidden to say one word about participation trophies.
As a guy who pays attention to sports for a living (and has 12-year-old and 9-year-old stepdaughters who play in youth leagues), the whole "participation trophy" crisis isn't one that, to me, rises to the top of my list of concerns. A few others outrank that.
What about sports specialization at younger and younger ages? Kids are picking one sport - or having one picked for them - either without the chance to try others or without the chance to try others for long enough to see if they like them.
I remember standing on a high school soccer sideline one night in Southwest Florida and running into a girl we had named our area player of the year not long before. She had signed to a major Division I school, so I asked her how things were going.
She told me she had quit the team.
I was stunned. She was one of the most talented players I had seen. Her reason: She was burned out. All those years of soccer, day in and day out, finally became too much. She ultimately returned to the sport at a Division II school after a couple of years away, but it took a couple of years to rekindle that love for the game.
Then there's parental interference. Obviously, parents should be the biggest advocates for their children when there is something actually wrong. Screaming that a coach is playing a child at the wrong position is not one of them. Wailing about strategy from the stands of a grade-school soccer game isn't it, either.
Yet, there they can be, red-faced with veins bulging as 10-year-olds run about, throwing tantrums over why a coach is running a 2-3 zone defense instead of man-to-man.
And then there is what might be the biggest problem, the overemphasis on winning, especially at the youngest levels of sports. During Walz's rant, he moaned about AAU teams that, after they lose the first game, get to play a few more at a tournament before they headed home.
"I know it was a long time ago, but God darn, the days we played, when you lost, you went home," he said. "There was no friendship bracket. You know, 'Let's go on the left side to the friendship games so everybody can play two more games.' No, you went home."
Here's the thing: Parents of travel-ball kids make a pretty hefty financial investment in those kids playing on those teams and going to those out-of-state tournaments. If they're shelling out the cash to send them, you bet your sweet bippy they want them to get a few games in before they head home.
After all, shouldn't that be the primary mission of youth sports, to improve, learn the game, learn better sportsmanship and learn to be better teammates through competition? Is there any level of sports where it's still most important to have fun and play the game? If a youth-league team wants to show its appreciation for a kid for sticking through a whole season, working hard and getting better at a sport, and wants to show it through a certificate or a little trophy, that's not a big deal.
And here's a little secret: Even with those participation trophies, kids still don't like losing. They still get jazzed about winning. And they're smart enough to know a participation award is a nice gesture, but not much more than that.
After all, the NCAA estimates 8 million students participate in high school athletics and less than half a million will play for NCAA athletic programs. And only a small percentage of those college athletes will become professional athletes. So we're all pretty much just playing for fun anyway.
Yet that won't stop someone else down the line from cursing the very existence of participation awards and blaming them for the downfall of modern society - or at least blaming them for why a team can't keep a lead with five minutes left in a game.
So we'll watch that next coach rant. We'll watch that diatribe go viral on the Internet. The big blue-and-green ball on which we live will keep on spinning.
But that coach is more than welcome to hand back his retention bonus.
Contact Derek Redd at 304-348-1712 or derek.redd@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekredd.