Medals and Honors

I have noticed that in the recent tournaments that we take part in, none of them offered any medals as the prizes. Instead, cash prizes and even beauty products were offered as incentives. Maybe it is because people want more tangible rewards rather than just medals and trophies. To me, winning medals is more important than having cash prizes. Money, once spent, will vanish but medals will stay with me. Perhaps, it is because I never had the opportunity to represent my school in sports and so do not have many medals in my possession. I never really knew what it was like to win something until I did it with KACC in Science Open. Since then, we had gone from strength to strength and recently finished third in 3 consecutive tournaments. It is unimaginable for a group of nobodies like us, who weren't athletes and were just everyday joes, to even win anything out of any tournament. It would have been too much to expect us to win another tournament and getting third is quite an achievement already. But somehow, some part of me keeps thinking that if things had been a little different, we might have done better. If medals were given out, we would have collected 3 bronze medals already. It's a pity, given that many of us really want some form of recognition badly. However, what matters most are the memories, medals only serve to remind us of those memories. The times when we were under immense pressure to get a result and managed to do it, the times when we had to fight back, the times when we encouraged each other and played as a team. These are the medals in our hearts.