I have been a swimmer for as long as I can remember. My parents would always describe me as a fish, a dolphin, and, when I became a bit sassier as a teenager, a shark. So naturally I started swimming competitively in a summer league. In my very first race I got disqualified for leaving the block too early. Tears rolled down my face as they called the winners to the podium, but they immediately ceased when I heard my name called too. Were they really calling me up there to announce that I had been disqualified? As it turns out I had won a ribbon! I walked around the rest of the meet proudly with a white ribbon that read, in a multi colored font, “participant.”
As I continued to swim, this trend would continue (Does this sentence sound awkward?). Granted I did learn not to leave the block too early so my efforts were eventually rewarded with first and second place ribbons, but even when I did make a mistake I was still reminded that I was a winner for simply participating. I could not leave a swim meet with fewer than five ribbons; I also was shaped with the mentality that I could not lose.
So you can imagine my surprise at the results of when I tried out for the varsity swim team my freshman year of high school (Does this sentence sound awkward too?). I went in with the mentality that I could not lose. I had been a winner throughout my entire swimming career and I probably had over one hundred ribbons to prove it. I made the team, but to my horror, I was put in the slowest lane of swimmers. If I am being honest, I was the fastest out of all of the slow swimmers but that is beside the point. It was at this point that I realized that not everyone is a winner.
Generation Y, the generation I am a part of, has been raised with the mentality that everyone is a winner. We have also been described as lazy, self obsessed, and entitled—all of these adjectives stemming directly from the excessive amounts of trophies we were given as children [3]. If you played in a little league soccer team, you were given a trophy even if you finished last in the league. When I worked as a counselor at a summer camp, my boss always told us that if we played a game, we needed to find a way to make sure that everyone who played got a piece of candy so that everyone could go home feeling like a winner. This always confused me. If we rewarded everyone, how would the winners feel accomplished? How would the kid who spent hours on the soccer field perfecting his soccer kick know that it was worth it? How would the girl who practiced late into the night on her driveway shooting free throws know that she could win a game for an entire team? The answer is that they would not, because these kids, like me, had been shaped to believe that everyone is a winner.
Maura Pennington, a contributor for Forbes Magazine, compares this train of thought to the planets in our solar system [1]. Pluto was told he was a planet all of his life when obviously he was too small and too far away to be legitimate. No one prepared him for the harsh reality of the day he found out that he was a dwarf planet. No one prepared him to lose. Who is preparing our children to lose? Reality is a harsh place, especially in an economy where the job market is so competitive. Generation Y, and I am not innocent of this, believes that we are entitled. I am not prepared for applying for the job that requires six rounds of interviews only to be cut after the fifth round. Will I get a ribbon for participating then to make it okay and take away the heartbreak? Ultimately, I have not learned to deal with rejection or losing. I can only imagine the catastrophic events that follow the days after one is rejected. When everyone is treated like a winner, ultimately everyone is a loser.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-sigman/when-everyone-gets-a-trop_b_1431319.html
http://www.livescience.com/38061-millennials-generation-y.html
This was an interesting topic and definitely something a lot of readers can identify with. I think both the first half of the essay where you write from almost a memoir style and the second half where you are much more argumentative both serve great purposes in this essay, but I think you could do a better job of synthesizing the two so the essay doesn’t seem like it’s organized into two separate sections. If you could integrate your argument into your personal experience and vice versa, this could be a very effective essay.
Darby- Thought that the intro was really good and made me laugh, but put a thesis at the end of it. I think that the first 3 paragraphs could be made a little shorter so you have more time to talk about your argument that basically, sports have made everyone feel like a winner, at the expense of the true winners. I think that this is a really interesting topic though. Towards the end the evidence started getting a little redundant though, and maybe expand how this mentality goes into society more, or perhaps talk more about how it makes people feel more self-entitled.
Darby, I found your argument really interesting, especially because I have also been told that everyone’s a winner. I think your argument makes sense. I like that you used examples from your personal life to provide evidence, and you brought up a really good point in the last paragraph, about how because everyone is taught to be a winner, no one is prepared to lose, which is something that inevitably happens in reality. In response to the parenthetical questions about your sentences sounding awkward, I don’t think the first sentence “As I continued to swim, this trend would continue.” sounds awkward, but it might be helpful to clarify what trend you’re talking about. As for the second sentence with the parentheses, I think changing the “of when” to “after” just makes the sentence flow better, so it would be “So you can imagine my surprise at the results after I tried out…” Overall, fascinating argument and great evidence!