It used to be that participating in sports involved performing your skills and executing the plays you had learned. Now it seems that showing off and showing up the opposition has become a big part of sports. High fives, belly bumps, and end zone dances are only a few examples. It has reached the point that football has had to enforce excessive celebration penalties. Other sports have talked about or have included baiting the opponent penalties. It is hard to say why all of this behavior has started and why it has become so widespread. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with being happy about your accomplishments on the field, on the court, in the pool, or wherever. It does become a problem when your celebration is designed to make someone else feel bad rather than to make you feel good. Trash talking, in the vast majority of the cases, is done solely to make another athlete feel bad or make them mad. Some coaches teach trash talking and many athletes try to use trash talking to try to get the target of the trash talking to lose their concentration. The problem is that the player doing the trash talking also is not concentrating on their game. One CYS reader indicated that he had seen a quote supposedly made by Coach Bobby Knight in which Coach Knight said he would rather have his player concentrating on his play instead of thinking up a wise aleck remark to make. When you resort to trash talking to try to defeat someone else you are admitting that you can't beat them using skills and play execution. You, in essence, are admitting that you are not as good an athlete as they are. Think about that when someone tries to use trash talking against you. Remember that they are telling you that you are better than they are. Instead of getting mad and trying to retaliate with trash talking or worse, like fighting, just prove that they are right. Play better than they do. Cursing at your opponents, making negative comments about the color of their skin, their ethnic origin, or anything similar is totally inappropriate anytime, including sports.

This article provided by Dr. Richard Stratton, Health and Physical Education Program, Virginia Tech