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Mel Callender, the 60-year-old golf coach at San Marcos High School, said he rewarded only one person in his gold team each year to make kids more competitive.

 

“Trophies motivate kids to shoot for a badge of honor to wear,” Callender said. “Awards [are] a motivational thing to wear, and hopefully a lot of young people will say, ‘I want to do that.’”

 

Callender had bought trophies from Hill Country Trophy for at least the last three to four years.

He said the reason he did this is that they always provide good customer service.

 

“Sometimes I made modifications in the last minute,” Callender said. “James was always willing to help as far as he could.”

 

Rick Rowell, the 63-year-old assistant firefighter in the San Marcos Fire Department, has bought trophies from this shop for over three decades, and he also felt they provided excellent customer service.

 

“If there’s a problem, they’re right there to deal with it, with a smile on their faces,” Rowell said.

 

Rowell gave firefighters in his organization trophies for their exemplary performance in emergency situations, such as floods.

 

“Trophies make your work life worthwhile,” Rowell said. “That is showing people we’ve gone out in adverse conditions and we’ve performed difficult tasks and we are appreciated.”

 

But not everyone supports the idea of trophies.

 

Jonathan Fader, the assistant professor of family medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in an article he wrote for Psychology Today that trophies are a bad metric for winners and losers alike.

 

Fader said that an external incentive, such as a trophy, decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task. And he called this phenomenon the overjustification effect.

 

“I coach tons of world-class athletes, and the pride they feel from a big win doesn’t come from a ring, or a trophy,” Fader wrote in the article. “That moment of pride comes from out performing the best of the best, from knowing that years of relentless training led them to the performance of a lifetime. The pride comes from doing what they love and being the best at it. And that’s a feeling no trophy can provide.”

 

People also hold different opinions of participation trophies. According to a 2014 poll by Reason Magazine, 57 percent of people felt that only the winning players should receive trophies. Another 40 percent said all kids on a sport team should receive a trophy for their participation.

Joe Evans, the director of the psychology department at Munroe-Meyer Institute, said participation trophies “are really not for achievement but for the effort.”

 

According to a 2015 study by Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, kids who were praised for their efforts were more willing to take the challenging task than those who were praised for their intelligence by 25 percent.

 

James liked the idea of participation trophy. “They are trying to teach children teamwork and help build their self esteem,” he said.

 

Evan Grossman, a writer from Pennsylvania, held the opposite idea. He said in an article for Men’s Journal that studies had shown that rewarding kids just for participation could produce a self-obsessed, irresponsible and unmotivated generation of false achievers.

 

“Protecting kids from the agony of defeat blunts their competitive edge and never teaches them to properly deal with adversity,” Grossman wrote in the article.

Grossman said participation trophies takes away kids’ desire to put in effort and make kids feel like finishing in last place may be good enough.

 

Yingxin Chen, a 20-year-old education junior at the University of Texas at Austin, said she agreed with Grossman.

 

When Chen participated in regional piano contest in her high school in Waco, everyone got the participation trophy finally.

 

“I didn’t have the motivation to work hard because I knew I would get the award,” Chen said.

 

The concept of trophy-for-everybody has had a positive impact on the trophy business. The trophy industry now has sales around $2 billion at the retail level, says Scott Sletten of JDS Industries, one of the world's largest trophy wholesalers.

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