I hate participation medals. With a passion. This is not a view I share with most of my friends here in Takoma Park, where the average political persuasion is a few notches to the left of Maxine Waters. I know I would catch all sorts of grief. "Kids gotta have self-esteem," and all that. Please. The amount of dross kids accumulate in pseudo-athletic endeavors is appalling.

Perhaps this antipathy stems from the fact that I always wanted a trophy when I was young. I won my Cub Scout pack's "olympics" two years running, and all I got was the right to be driven over to Kansas City and get my ass waxed by kids who were actually athletic. (It turns out that outperforming a bunch of professors' kids doesn't really qualify one as "athletic." Who knew?). Trophy? Nope.

Once I bought a trophy at a garage sale. I thought that would make me feel better. But it didn't. Twenty-five cents worth of plastic, wood and metal are just that. I hadn't earned the trophy or anything. And anyway, I never really played tennis.

So I still wanted to earn a trophy of my own. Didn't happen. And finally, when I was in high school, I had to go to a trophy shop to pick some up for an awards ceremony of one kind or another. Looking around at the thousands of bases and ornaments cured me once and for all of trophy envy. Trophies are, literally, a dime a dozen.

A couple weeks ago, one of my neighbors hailed me as I drove past his house. "Does Max want to play in a four-on-four soccer tournament?" Well, sure. The spring season didn't go well for Max's team (they didn't win a game, tying only a couple), but he still loves playing. And while the rest of his team for the tourney would be first-graders playing in a second-grade division (Max would be the lone second-grader), I figured that he would, at the very least, have fun playing soccer with friends.

The tournament consisted of three twenty-minute games in the preliminaries (at 8:30, 9:30 and 10:30) and a twenty-minute final played at 11:30. Four games in three-and-a-half hours. That's something. Especially when you're playing without substitutes.

Max's team's first game was against an all-star version of the best team in his regular league. These kids are good, and two of them are taller than Max, who is one of the tallest kids in his grade at school. The size and skill advantage favored the other side. One of Max's teammates took one look at their opponents and said, "We're so dead." "No, we're not," Max chirped loudly. The team nodded almost as one. Nothing else needed to be said.

The other side scored almost immediately after the kickoff. And that was the point when I knew Max's team would be just fine. They didn't pout. They didn't yell at each other. They kinda shrugged and then ran the ball back to center. Within five minutes they had tied the score. And then they played almost the entire second half peppering the other team's goal. The game ended in a tie, but Max's team knew that it was on to something.

One of the things that sports can teach kids (and adults) is that teamwork and team chemistry is often more important as skill. Even great players can seem to disappear if their confidence wanes. And if you don't like your team, you're less likely to play well, much less win. Max and his teammates were already friends, and they really enjoyed playing together. Most importantly, they passed the ball to each other unselfishly. The other teams did not.

Max's team won its next two games 2-0 and 4-0, which set up a grudge match in the final with the first team they'd played. Once again, the other side scored first. A penalty kick evened the score at 1-1 by halftime. The coach of the other side chatted me up during the break and said, "We've got to figure out how to get the ball past Max. He's killing us."

"It's not a state secret," I told the coach, who is a friend of mine and the father of a friend of Max's. "If you let Max see even six inches of the ball off your foot, he'll take it. But if you dribble tightly, you can get by him."

I must confess to a bit of gamesmanship here. I told the other coach the truth, but not the whole truth. The whole truth is that Max and one of his teammates had worked out a switch, so that when Max moved up to challenge an opponent charging at him, his teammate ran around behind and easily stole the ball if the opponent was able to beat Max. Like so many things the kids did, this backup play (which is something that pros do) was their own invention, not the result of coaching. And like so many of their inventions on Saturday, it worked very well.

A penalty midway through the second half gave Max's team a 2-1 lead, and they held on to win. A team of first-graders (and Max) had ripped through three teams full of the best players in the second-grade league. Okay, so the first-graders in question also played in (and starred in) the second-grade league. The result still surprised just about everyone, including me.

And Max got a trophy. "Finally, a trophy that means something," my wife said. She's right. He earned it.

The thing I enjoyed the most about the morning was watching Max enjoy playing soccer. He looked more comfortable and more confident than I've ever seen him before--even when his team was losing. He didn't have a swagger, but rather he shone with an almost serene confidence. When opposing players moved up on him, he strode powerfully into the play and calmly sent the ball in the opposite direction. No trash talk, and not even much of a change in his expression. He could've been the Dalai Lama on the field, except for when his team scored. Max knows that he's good, he knows that his teammates are good and he knows what is going to happen when he puts his foot on he ball. Then he makes things happen.

Life doesn't provide most of us with many of these moments. Indeed, I spent most of the morning waiting for Max's team to tire and wipe out. That didn't happen. And the somewhat unexpected nature of the result only made it that much sweeter. And for once, Max brought home some hardware that meant something.

That's cool, too.

Jon Worley enjoys watching his kids play sports, even when they don't win.