Derby Participation Award

[Greaves]

I'm the CC for my son's Pack. We're planning the PWD for early March. I want to have participation 'awards' for every scout who enters a car. The CM thinks we ought to have awards solely for the top three winners. (I'm not sure if he means for the whole pack, or per rank, but at any rate, he's only thinking trophies.)

 

I want to award every scout something for participating, and have the derby medals for the winners. Are those are approved for uniform wear? Trophies are nice, I guess, but a medal on your uniform? Sweeet!!! Easier for other people to see it, too.

 

So. . .opinions?

[Buffalo Skipper]

In the past, we have given either the medals or the patches for participation, with small trophies for 1st/2nd/3rd. This year we found trophies for just over $6.00 each. Small but meaningful. We did patches this year for participation. We also do certificates for: Most Aerodyanamic, Best Paint Job, Most Unusual, etc. These are voted upon by the cubs, but the judges skew the results so one boy does not receive too many awards. It recognizes the non-winners for their hard work.

[Lisabob]

I'll let someone else address the uniform issue. We awarded something to every boy, whether it was a small trophy (one year we got these donated) or a certificate, or whatever. These are little kids we're talking about! One pack we were with also awarded top 3 or 4 trophies for boys in every rank. Another awarded these only for the whole pack.

 

Many packs offer non-speed awards like most creative paint job, best suited to the year's theme, etc. Design and creativity awards like that allowed us to recognize more boys and there were a few every year who cared more about what the car looked like than how fast it was.

[ManyHats]

We give out 3 trophies for the overall winners in both the cub class and open class. We also give trophies for best paint job, most patriotic, scout theme, most unusual and a pack favorite that the boys vote on. Last year we gave small medallions that were on a red, white and blue ribbon. The ribbon was long enough for them to wear around their neck.

[ScoutNut]

Every boy gets a Driver's License, a participation certificate, a "Did My Best" PWD ribbon, and a display stand for their car (courtesy of the 5th grade Webelos).

 

We have certificates for the top 3 most creative cars.

 

The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners (we only do overall, no den) each get a red/wht/blue PWD medal with the year and their place # written on it.

 

Seems to make everyone happy.

 

[Karen_216]

We give medals for the top 4 finshers in each den.

Really nice trophies to top 5(this year) in the pack. Used to give out participation ribbons but the have been the same so we now have patches. you can buy the ribbons fromscout shop in packs of 10 (?). Not a huge investment.

We also are doing drivers licences which I dowlnaded from a website and we write in the names.

Plus we take a picture of each boy with his car in front of a NAscar background- don't know where this came from it's been around for years.

if you have a digital printer you can print out then and paste to a background. We gives ours out at Blue and Gold.

We also give out about 15 design certificates:

Best Superhero

Best Scout theme

Most Futuristic

Most Colorful

Most likely built by a scout

Best sports theme

Most PAtriotic

Most original design

Best classic

Most Aerodynamic

you could keep going on with these. (best effort, shiniest, etc- so that there is enough to go around. Or even- 1st year derby participant, 2nd yr, etc.

Our boys do wear their place medals on their uniform. They are advised to take off for a uniform inspection but they love wearing to pinewood derby each year all thier "bling". Funniest thing is seeing the littlest cub with a giant trophy.

Ours are customized with rank and place and pack. There's a site that does this and the awards too and we don't pay an arm and a leg.

[John-in-KC]

A participation award I've seen is the "Gold Spark Plug." Someone gets used plugs from a shop, cleans them, and paints them gold. Plugs are then inserted in a simple wood base.

 

I like the idea of PWD license too.. especially if home-made.

[Twocubdad]

FYI, From the Insignia Guide --

 

Activity Medals (Pinewood Derby, Space Derby, Regatta and the generic "activity medal") may be worn in a straight line above the left pocket, no more than five at a time.

[AlabamaDan]

As a pack we give trophies for 1/2/3 place in each division scout modified/tiger stock/wolf stock/bear stock/webelos stock and overall. Everyone gets a certificate of some kind.

 

As a den leader, I gave my boys a little patch and participation certificate.

[SSScout]

Each Pack is different, in size, number of Dens, composition, etc. So each Pack can decide what awards to award. Make it fun and worth while so they will want to participate next year.

A PWD patch to everyone.

A "Divers License" sounds like fun.

After Tiger, Wolf, Bear, Web1, Web2 that makes 5 patches! Ribbons , with crossed flags, or car buttons, or such atttached.

Sounds like time to get the "brag vest"! See to providing the boys with their red felt vests! Get BIG sizes, they will grow abit in the interim. Search this forum for "vest" patterns, I know we have talked about such things. A Cub can collect a goodly number of patches and ribbons in his career. Give'm a place to show'em off.

 

 

 

[ScoutMomSD]

every cub in our den gets an award. We take digital pics and decide at the leader meeting.

 

Some are very funny. Like "Best red car". Basically we pick out something unique about the car and create a "best" for it. These are paper certificates - the trophies are for speed in the heats

 

 

[IM_Kathy]

we've done it a couple of different ways because of changes over the years of how we did things...

 

but the 1 thing that always stayed the same is that every single scout that entered a car recieved a participation ribbon.

 

when my son was early in cubs they had catagories that you'd enter your car into and there would be a vote for design and there would be 1-3 place medals for each category. later the pack realized that often a webelo scout wouldn't fare too well in this because the scout would do more of the work than a tiger who would watch over his dad... so we switched from catagories to breaking them up by rank and still medals for top 3 of each.

 

for the racing... we use to do a double elimination tourney - we switched with a new track to 4 lanes and having to race once on each lane... but we always did a trophy for 1-3 in the whole pack for race times.