Trophy a Terrible Thing to Store--or Not to Store

Another soccer season is set to begin, and my daughter’s big question has nothing to do with the shinguards she is strapping on or the practice she’s about to attend. Where, she wonders, are we going to put the trophy?

She’s only 10, with just a few seasons of sports behind her. But already she’s racked up so many trophies in soccer, basketball and track, there is no room left on the shelf I built to hold them all.

It’s not that she is some athletic superstar. She has trophies for teams that never won a game, seasons when she hardly left the bench, never scored a point, barely even touched the ball. It’s just that a kid can’t don a uniform these days without a trophy landing in her arms.

I’m not complaining ... yet. I love the glow in my daughters’ eyes as trophies are handed out at each season’s end. Never mind that their names are sometimes misspelled, and that more than once, the plastic lady athlete on top has come unglued or been dismembered before we got the trophy out of the car.

For my girls, the trophies are a source of pride--a symbol of belonging, not winning, a testimony not to physical prowess, but to teamwork and camaraderie. Still, as the collections grow, it seems that their importance shrinks. My oldest no longer has hers on display. The shelf that once held trophy cups with jump-shot shooting figurines now holds a CD player, aromatherapy candles, a makeup tray and a collection of picture frames. The girls in the photos are wearing bikinis, not basketball shorts or soccer cleats. And the trophies my teenager once cherished are crowded on a shelf at the back of her closet--out of sight, if not out of reach.

I look ahead and see myself in the shoes of my friend, Howard--all trophied up, with nowhere to go.

There are five boxes of trophies collecting dust in his garage, from the years his daughter was a cheerleader and his son played football. His son is now a doctor; the daughter teaches school. “They don’t want them; they don’t have room,” he says. “And I can’t bring myself to throw them away. So what am I supposed to do?”

Today’s trophies tend toward the simple and cheap ... assembly-line creations of acrylic and plastic and new-age resins, topped by flimsy figurines. You could buy one off the shelf for $12; sports teams that order in bulk pay less.

But their value often exceeds their worth. “In a lot of sports leagues, they’re a marketing tool,” says Sue Combes, whose family has operated Trophy Emporium in the San Fernando Valley for 20 years. “Teams use the promise of ‘Everybody gets a trophy’ to draw kids in.”

Even beyond sports, trophies are used to reward and motivate. “We make trophies for piano teachers, who are taking a cue from sports teams and giving awards to students based on how much music they’ve memorized, how many contests they’ve entered, how much time they spent practicing,” Combes said. “They realize those same kids are on sports teams, where they get something at the end of the season. There’s a huge emphasis now on everybody getting something.”

Combes says trophies are an emotional touchstone for many people. “Some people hold on to them forever and treasure every one,” she said. “I was surprised after the big earthquake how many people brought in trophies they’d had around for 20 years to be repaired. A lot of them were just your typical Little League trophies; nothing special to the rest of us, but they meant a lot to them. It was very important to them to get them rebuilt and back on display.”

She suspects that the meaning of trophies waxes and wanes as we age. “Kids love them--the bigger, the flashier the better. Then you get older, in your 20s, and they’re not so important. You don’t have room, so you leave them behind.”

Combes recently found herself rummaging through the box of awards her parents had saved from her youth--and deposited in her garage--to fish out trophies that she had won for music and basketball. “They’d been stashed away for years, and I hadn’t really thought about them. But I wanted to show them to my son, to prove that I’d actually done something,” she said. “And I realized how much I had forgotten ... and how much fun I had when I was young.”

Some say we have gone too far, that passing out trophies so freely diminishes their meaning. “It seems like kids get a trophy for breathing these days,” my friend Howard complains. “This whole thing about rewards and self-esteem .... Everybody’s got to be a winner.”

But some children will never play on a team, or sit down at a piano, or take a prize at a science fair. And Combes has an idea that can brighten their lives, as well as solve the problem of families with trophies to spare.

“The best suggestion I ever heard was to donate your trophies to groups that work with challenged children or adults,” she said. “Maybe they never had the chance to participate in something where you win a prize like this .... They don’t care if there’s a bowler or a horse on top. The idea that they got something that’s big and flashy, that’s very exciting to them.”

And what better way to become a real winner than to let your castoff trophy brighten someone else’s life?

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com