Medals Aren't Just for Sport: How to Display Spelling Bee, Music Exam and Academic Awards
Ask someone to picture a medal, and they'll probably picture a runner crossing a finish line. But plenty of medals have nothing to do with sport at all. A grade 8 piano exam. A regional spelling bee. A maths olympiad. A dance show. These achievements took just as much work — sometimes more — and they end up in exactly the same place as race medals: a drawer, forgotten.
That's partly a display problem. Most medal display products are built assuming a runner, a ribbon, and a race bib. If your medal is from a spelling bee or a music exam, a running-shaped display box just doesn't fit the achievement — so it never gets displayed at all.
Why non-sporting medals get overlooked
Sport dominates how we think about medals, so sport dominates the products built to display them. Search for a medal display box and nearly everything that comes up assumes running, cycling, or football. If your child came home with a medal from a spelling bee or a music exam, there's rarely anything designed with that in mind — so it goes in the same drawer as everything else, just because nothing feels like the right fit.
That's a shame, because these medals often mark something significant: months of practice, a nerve-wracking exam, a competition most people never even enter.
What actually works for a non-sporting medal display
A few things matter more here than for a typical race medal:
- A purpose-built, plain personalised box design lets the achievement itself take centre stage.
- It should say what the medal is actually for. On a hanger crowded with twenty other medals, nothing tells you which one was the real achievement — a personalised MyMedal box does.
- It has to work for a child's achievement as easily as an adult's. Academic and music medals span every age — the display shouldn't look like it was designed only for one.
- It should feel worth the achievement. A spelling bee win took as much effort as a marathon — it deserves a display that says so.
How MyMedal works for non-sporting achievements
MyMedal's plain box has no sport silhouette — it's a clean, neutral design that works for a spelling bee medal exactly as well as a dance show or a maths competition award. You still get up to five lines of your own text, 13 characters per line, so any name, the achievement, the date, and any detail worth remembering — a grade, a placing, a personal note — sit right there with the medal.
You pick a colour — White, Gold, Silver, or Rose Gold — and mount it with the included 3M Command strip or the integrated nail slot. It fits any ribbon size, and it's printed within 24 hours of ordering. And because the medal simply sits in the box, it can always come out again later if needed. No medal? Now you can order one from us for a little extra charge.
One medal, or a whole wall of different achievements
Some families pick one standout achievement — the exam that took the most work, the competition that meant the most — and give it real space. Others build a mixed wall over time: a spelling bee win next to a piano exam next to a football medal, each one in its own box, each one telling a different story. Both work. The point isn't to sort achievements into "sport" and "everything else" — it's to stop any of them from disappearing into a drawer just because nothing felt like the right fit.
If you haven't seen it yet, this page picks up where How to Display a Race Medal So It Doesn't End Up in a Drawer left off — and if running's more your thing, here's how to display running medals.