These days I pay good money (about 15 bucks a trip!) to shower and bathe with my coworkers. As my dear professor once proclaimed, “I cannot honestly call you my friend until we’ve drunk and seen each other naked.”
Showered after swimming in high school, but that was the only time after gym class that we were given enough time to do so. Keep in mind also that this was the late 80s - you didn’t spend 45 minutes and half a can of hairspray on your big hair in the morning only to hose it all out after first period gym! There was time for touchups only!
never had the big hair myself but hooboy you should see my high school yearbooks
Jenaroph, as long as you are talking about the hair on your head, I’ll take a look at that yearbook. 
Heh. I’m headed off to bed but I’ll see if I can’t come up with a scan later…
Class of '99 in California…
We had open showers, but nobody used them. In the bad old days (when my mom went to school) they had to use them, but somewhere along the way it became optional. I believe there were a small number of actual stalls (for girls on their period?) and if you really did want to shower you’d use those.
It wasn’t a problem because we never got sweaty in gym class. My memories of gym are mostly hiding from the teacher, jogging at a snail’s pace around the track, and half-assedly “playing” soccer or whatever by standing at the back of the field and hoping the ball never came near.
I graduated high school in 1969. My high school graduating class had 1500 people, and we had at least a couple of hundred boys in each of my gym classes. That, plus a 45 minute period, meant that if we had to shower we would have had to have started when we walked in the door.
In any case, the gym teachers gave up on the nerd division rather early, and we mostly ran around the track. I have no bad memories of gym.
Male, high school class of '02, Texas.
My senior year, I was on the Cross Country Team, and we had practice from 7:30 in the morning until the end of the first period (about 9AM), this gave us time to stretch and warm up, then do about five miles worth of running or some time in the weight room. Sometimes they’d mix-and-match the weights with the running (this sucked the day that we worked up a sweat in the weight room, then went outside for a short run in what turned out to be the first below-freezing day of the year).
Pretty much, every practice we were not only required to shower afterwards, but we had to do so promptly so we could be in the classroom on time for our mandatory 15 minute study hall period (which we typically used to eat breakfast, and never for studying).
Bonus points for me, as one day each week, I had to be in uniform for JROTC for the rest of the day, so I’d run, shower, get dressed in my service dress uniform, AND try not to be late for study hall (if you were late for study hall, it was five minutes on The Wall, back against the wall, knees at 90 degrees, arms out. I got to do this in a uniform not designed to let you raise your arms very far a few times)
That said, the showers weren’t really all that thorough. We’d get in the shower, and basically use shampoo strategically to nuke most of the funk as quickly as possible. I had a friend on the female run team who would occasionally tease me about how they supposedly spent their time in he female locker room, but she says mostly they just changed into clean clothes and forwent the shower.
Heck no. There wasn’t time for one thing. For another, considering that a few of the girls insisted on changing in the bathroom stalls, getting people to shower would’ve been a heck of a fight for the teachers.
I was used to changing near other people from summer camp, but I wouldn’t want to shower in front of them.
Oh, class of 2000 here, in Southern California.
Class of 1997, British-type private school in Canada. Yes, we had to shower in the nude, in gang-style showers. No, it was no fun at all, and we all skedaddled through it just as fast as we could.
Nope.
My High School gym had showers but no one ever made use of them. A lot us, however, kept deodorant in our gym lockers.
Female, gradjeeated in '78
We had showers but never used them, and there wasn’t enough time anyway. I suppose the athletic teams used the showers, but I never saw them turned on and had a vague feeling that they didn’t actually work. We all kept deodorant in our lockers, but PE wasn’t usually very sweaty anyway. It was only sort of technically exercise.
Graduated 1991.
We had to shower after gym, in fact the gym coach would watch us. He’d make sure everyone got into the shower and then got out of the shower. And you had better be wet including your hair.
This was around 1978 -1981 so the hair on guys was long and it wasn’t great to walk around for half the day with a wet head, but we had to
My school did have showers, but they were never used in classes. Athletic teams used them sometimes, I’m told. I think it’s funny when you see school shower-related comedy on TV, since it was probably common when some of the writers were in school but hasn’t been for years.
That’s either dedication to the rules, or creepy. Not sure which, though.
We had P.E. every single day: each semester had 6 weeks of gym, 6 weeks of swimming, and 6 weeks of “hygiene” class. Showers after gym class was mandatory; you couldn’t leave without turning in your wet towel, which you got as you left the shower.
And swimming was nude, for the boys. Girls wore suits.
And yes, this was a public high school. Class of '63.
Class of 80. It was required, but I never did, and there wasn’t enough time anyway. Very few of the boys showered. We were quite homophobic. In Jr. High we were required to shower the first month or so of the first year and then the teacher gave up. A few still showered.
You were* supposed* to shower after Phys Ed when I had to take it; I, however, did not. For one thing, our HS being pretty small, the entire grade took Phys Ed together == which meant the whole male sector of 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th grade was taking that damned class with me. TMany, if not most of those guys used to love giving me a real hard time – you think I was gonna let myself be all wet and nekkid and vulnerable in front of the whole crew, you got another think coming.
Besides, every year I was forced to take PE, it was ionvariably a straight-up hour of sheer tedious hell for me anyway, and I refused to extend it by the six or eight extra minutes it took to hose down and towel off. When “Coach” blew that whistle and yelled “Hit th’showers!” I would always hit the nearest exit instead.
The Catholic school I went to for 1st and 2nd grade, and again for 6th through 8th (it’s a long story), did not have showers.
The public school I went through in 3rd through 5th grade did have showers. Sometimes the gym teacher would say we were not allowed to shower, sometimes he would say we had to shower, and sometimes he would say we could choose ourselves. We girls generally only showered if he said we had to, because he had a tendency to wander through the girls’ locker room when we were showering! (He never touched. But he DID look. There was no mistaking that.)
In high school we had a beautiful shower room, with separate stalls and shower curtains even. We were never given time to use it! Girls and boys had separate gym classes, and the girls’ classes always ran so long that we barely had time to change into our regular clothes again and rush off to the next class. Seriously, I quite literally never showered after gym throughout high school, and after the first year I quit bothering to bring soap and a towel, since it seemed this was a matter of policy. The boys, on the other hand, were always given time to shower, which given that we’re talking about sweaty teenage guys was probably a good thing 
We girls just had to deal with smelling of sweat and an extra shot of deodorant.
I did in Jr. High because it was required, but didn’t bother in High School.
- I never really got that sweaty in P.E.
- P.E. (for me anyway) was almost always in afternoon.
- The teacher usually wouldn’t finish class until just a couple of minutes before the bell, so there was never enough time to shower before the next class.
I also didn’t shower after sports practice, since I was going straight home and would shower there.
US public school, class of 1990.
Neither of the grade schools I attended had showers, but my high school (9-12) did, and we used them. Heck, the signal that PE was over was the teacher yelling, “Arright, hit the showers!” Fifty, sixty guys race for the showers. All the showers at high school were the big open room variety. The only problem was sometimes someone would snap you with a wet towel*, and of course you had wet hair for an hour or two. I don’t remember any effort being made to force guys to shower, but I looked forward to free hot water, without Dad yelling that anything over two minutes was just wasting money. (He was right, but he was paying for a whole family. Nowadays a long, hot shower is one of my favorite luxuries in life.) Frankly, we were sweaty as hell at the end of PE, and frequently filthy - especially after a rousing game of “No-rules Soccer”. I graduated in 1973.
*My freshman year, some guy who was a starting tackle got me good; I still had the welt two days later. Jeez, the guy was about 290, I only weighed 120 pounds. But he taught me the proper method of winding up the towel for snapping, and how important the moisture content of the towel was, when my attempt at immediate retaliation went hilariously wrong.