Getting a participation trophy is the worst, imagine you are on a team, and you are the only person working and everyone else just shows up and slacks off and at the end of the year you are the only person that did anything, but everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. So why did you work as hard as you did if you just got recognized as equal to the people that just showed up? That is the issue with participation trophies, they reward people for doing nothing.
The idea of a participation trophy is a ridiculous concept and is degrading to people that put in the work. Even if a team does go and wins it all it does not matter because that would have gotten a trophy away so why even try to win if you will get rewarded