Spoons
Charter Member Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Lethbridge, Alberta
Posts: 7,068
Do the kids ever play an unorganized pickup game of any kind? Say, a baseball game in the schoolyard at lunch, or a weekend afternoon football game in the park? What do they do then? As I recall my own childhood, we always kept score in such games. Not that it really mattered--teams would change from day to day as the day's captains would select from the available pool of kids who showed up. But it never occurred to us not to keep score.
Certainly in the organized sports I participated in during my childhood, scores were kept. Somebody won and somebody lost. We all wanted to play like the pros we watched on TV did, and that included keeping score. I think we would have refused to play if the adults told us that scores would not be kept, as to us, it would have been pointless.
To more directly address the OP's question, I think scores should be kept at any age. But I don't think it should be for any reason related to "fostering the competitiveness that will be needed as an adult." Rather, I think it's because keeping score is a part of the game. If you're not keeping score, you're not playing the game.
Good question: What do the organizing adults tell the kids who want to keep score?
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