Sportsmanship awards sit in a category most clubs include but few actually think through. The trophy gets ordered, a name gets picked, and the presentation happens. Then, by the following season, nobody can quite remember what the criteria were. That gap between intention and execution is where these awards tend to lose their meaning.
Done properly, a sportsmanship award is one of the most powerful forms of recognition a club can give. It signals what the organisation values beyond the scoreboard. It tells every junior athlete in the room that conduct, attitude and respect matter as much as ability. When it's done carelessly, though, it reads as a consolation prize for a player who didn't quite make the other categories.
What sportsmanship awards actually measure
The word "sportsmanship" gets used as though it means one thing. It doesn't. Before your club hands out an award, it's worth deciding which qualities you're actually recognising. The four most common are:
- Fair play on the field: Accepting referee decisions, avoiding deliberate infringements, and not disputing calls in front of opponents.
- Attitude in adversity: How a player responds to a heavy loss, an injury, or a bad run of form.
- Conduct off the field: Behaviour at away games, how athletes interact with opposing clubs, and how they represent the team in social settings.
- Support for teammates: Encouraging struggling players, welcoming newcomers, and building team culture rather than focusing only on personal performance.
A club that's clear about which of these it's measuring will have far less trouble selecting winners. Ambiguity in the criteria is the single biggest cause of sportsmanship award disputes.
Who should decide the winner
This is the question most clubs avoid answering directly, and then regret it. There are three common models, each with trade-offs.
Coaching staff selection. Coaches see the most. They watch training, away travel, post-game behaviour and in-game decisions. The downside is that their view can be skewed toward players they like or toward athletes who perform well. Sportsmanship can look different from the bench than it does in the huddle.
Player vote. Peer-voted awards carry a particular authority because the recognition comes from the people who shared the experience. A player voted best sportsperson by their teammates has earned something different from a trophy handed down by management. The risk is that popularity and sportsmanship aren't the same thing, and in junior sport, friendship groups can distort the result.
Opposition nomination. Some competitions ask opposing teams to nominate the best sportsperson from the side they just played. This is rarer in Australian club sport but produces genuinely credible outcomes. If the other team nominates you, the recognition is hard to argue with. For clubs interested in this model, it's worth reading more about peer-voted awards and getting the process right before setting the criteria.
Choosing the right award format
A sportsmanship award should look and feel distinct from the MVP or best-and-fairest trophy. If it looks identical to every other category, it signals that it's an afterthought. The format communicates the value.
For junior sport, a medal on a ribbon is often more meaningful than a trophy. Medals get worn. They go on school bags and bedroom walls. A trophy sits on a shelf. If the club wants athletes to carry the recognition with them, a well-engraved medal is often the better call. Westlakes Trophies produces medals with full custom engraving, including the recipient's name, the season, and the club's name, so the award tells the whole story at a glance.
For senior or representative sport, a plaque or a quality acrylic award works well. It sits in a home or workplace and reads as something earned, not distributed. If your club presents multiple trophies on the night, consider a material that sets the sportsmanship award apart: timber, crystal or a colour-fill design rather than the standard resin trophy.
The engraving matters as much as the format. A sportsmanship award with a vague inscription ("Best Sportsperson 2026") lands very differently from one that captures the quality being recognised. For wording help across different award types, the guide to choosing sports awards covers formats and inscriptions across a wide range of categories.
Avoiding the consolation-prize problem
The most common mistake clubs make with sportsmanship awards is presenting them last, after the headline trophies, with noticeably less ceremony. Players notice. So do parents. If the award gets five seconds of stage time compared to two minutes for the best-and-fairest, the message is clear: this one doesn't count.
Presentation order matters. A sportsmanship award placed mid-ceremony, with a short explanation of why this particular player was chosen, reads as a genuine honour rather than a filler category. The citation doesn't need to be long. Two or three sentences describing a specific moment or quality the recipient demonstrated is far more powerful than a generic "for displaying excellent sportsmanship throughout the season."
Specificity is what makes recognition stick. "For consistently encouraging younger teammates during a difficult mid-season run" tells a story. "For displaying excellent sportsmanship" tells nothing.
Running the category year after year
Sportsmanship awards work best when the criteria stay consistent across seasons. If the club changes what it's measuring every year, the award loses its identity. Players can't aspire to something when the target keeps shifting.
Write the criteria down, even briefly, and share them at the start of the season. This does two things. It tells athletes explicitly what the club values. And it makes the end-of-season selection easier because coaches and voters have a shared reference point.
Some clubs run a perpetual sportsmanship trophy that accumulates the names of past winners on a plaque beneath the main award. This adds weight to the recognition. Winning the award puts a player into a named lineage rather than giving them a single object. If your club is considering that format, the specifics of managing a perpetual trophy, including how to handle engraving updates and custody arrangements, are worth planning before the first name goes on. Westlakes Trophies can add name plates to perpetual trophies each season, keeping the record intact without replacing the base award.
A note on junior sport specifically
In junior sport, sportsmanship awards carry an additional responsibility. Children are watching how adults respond to wins, losses, refereeing decisions and opponents. The award signals what the adults in charge actually prioritise.
Clubs that give sportsmanship awards real ceremony, real criteria and real recognition tend to see that attitude reflected on the field. Clubs that treat it as an afterthought tend to see the same. The award is the visible part of a broader culture, not a substitute for one.
If your club is planning a full presentation night and working out how to order the categories, the sportsmanship award deserves a prominent slot. Getting the sequence right across a full evening of recognition takes more thought than most organisers expect, and the guide on managing the awards order at a presentation night covers that planning in detail.
Westlakes Trophies supplies sportsmanship awards for sporting clubs across Australia, including medals, trophies, plaques and custom engraved acrylic awards. Contact the team to discuss formats, quantities and engraving options for your club's end-of-season night.