I was listening to Dara Ó Cinneíde discussing the decision by the GAA to “double down,” as they have put it, on the effective ban on holding competitive games at ages under 12.
A directive from Croke Park has reminded clubs that no competitions involving children under 12 are to be permitted.
The GAA claims that this is merely a reiteration of the policy that is already supposed to be in place since the introduction of Go Games more than a decade ago, but the fact that the reiteration is needed is an indication that many clubs are clearly in breach of that policy.
Indeed, anyone who pays attention to the games held at half time at Croke Park and other venues involving primary school boys and girls will have noted that goals and victory are no less celebrated than they are in the senior games played on the same day. Even if nobody is supposed to be keeping score.
The whole concept during the championship is based on children from schools in the competing counties getting a chance to emulate their heroes and heroines in the big matches. It is a huge source of joy to the children and their parents and from speaking to some of the latter who’s more talented offspring graced the sacred turf at Croke Park, everyone knows who won. That does not, by the way, greatly diminish the occasion for children on either of the teams.
Likewise, Cumann na mBunscoil, which administers primary schools hurling and football and camogie from where the half times teams are selected – but which is technically independent of the GAA – continues to hold keenly contested competitions and has winners and losers and trophies and medals. There would be no point otherwise.
Ó Cinnéide was speaking just after a piece on a highly successful schools competition held in Kerry involving schools from within the Gaeltacht and Gaeilscoileanna from Tralee and further afield.
When asked about the guidelines, Ó Cinnéide – who won three All Ireland senior medals with Kerry and was on the Gaeltacht team that lost the 2004 All Ireland club final to Caltra s- aid that he recalls a losing game as a child more than all of the games he played as an adult. He does not support the elimination of competitions.
Now, you could take that either way. Opponents of competitive sports might claim that Dara’s “trauma” is proof of the awful damage inflicted by being on a losing team.
Others, including his fellow countyman Colm Cooper and Seán Cavanaugh, made the point on The Sunday Game, that all of the taking part in competitive sports from an early age is part of learning about life.
One of the other widely reported reactions from a former elite player, Anthony Moyles of Meath, sums up the reaction of many people. As does one of the responses which makes the valid point that it can often be adults – parents perhaps more so than coaches in my experience – who turn underage games or indeed any games even ones on television into occasions to vent their demand to experience some vicarious victory perhaps denied to them in their own sporting and other lives.
The reality is that if children take part in sport which is by definition competitive they mostly do want to win, or to measure themselves and their team against others.
Because as Moyles point out, most people who take part in sports lose more often, or as often, as they win.
Sometimes is against oneself as is the case for people who run or cycle or swim but not in competition against others. As anyone who has run regularly knows, it is just as disappointing to find out that your times are slipping when you are pounding the roads on your own as it is to lose a race. Anyone I know who has run in marathons will know their times, but not where they finished usually.
There is also an obvious didactic or even ideological element to all of this. It is the creation of people who think that humanity can be improved by attempting to create social situations which are the outcome of engineering rather than natural development.
In that context, you may also be pretty certain that in a Venn diagram of adults who support introducing children to concepts that many parents find objectionable and about which they have no been consulted, and those opposed to competitive sports for children would indicate a considerable overlap.
The same applies to those who wish to diminish or eliminate gradings and exam results, or even in some instance to do away with exams altogether.
As with other similarly grounded projects, this was given a brief outing here during the Covid Panic. There are a number of research studies which show that the consequence of more “equal” examinations and gradings is that the best students eventually stop bothering, and the poorer ones just keep doing, or not doing, what they were always doing because trying to improve would make no difference.
Why would the same not apply to sport? Why train if the object is not to be improve yourself but also to be better than others? Why engage in matches and competitions at all if there are no scores kept, and there are supposed to be no winners even though if hurling or football are played within all the other normal parameters that everyone taking part will know anyway who was the better team and which team won.
And at what stage is competition supposed to be introduced? Are we to believe that a 13 year old who adults have attempted to convince that nobody ever loses will be less “traumatised” by losing at under 14 than if they had undergone such a life shattering event aged 11?
Or is the object to eliminate competition altogether, and I suspect it is on the part of some of the advocates of this.
The only way to avoid that is to absurdly engineer a situation in which a pretence is created or the games manipulated in order to create a completely false outcome. And if you think that sounds a bit like the way socialism was supposed to work, then you would not be far of the mark. The pretence that things are other than they are.