I have the ever so lovely combination of being non-athletic and non-competitive. Anything we did as individuals in P.E,. I was okay with. Running, tennis, aerobics (it was the 80s), bowling, etc. Team sports like baseball, volleyball, etc. were horrible. For some reason I always ended up with the insane jocks on my team. I saw it as just a game and never really cared if we won or lost. I mean, it’s 9th grade P.E… right??? But they would flip out on me.
We had two female coaches, both incredible athletes. One was totally cool and seemed to get that to some of us, it was JUST a game. The other was a nightmare. She heckled me and the others like me. Then she started to seem to really have it out for me.
One day we were doing team relays and had to run from one end of the basketball court to the other and make a basket. Then run back and give the ball to the next kid. The other coach always made us try 5-7 times and then let us run back, even if we didn’t make it. But not Coach S. We had to shoot until we made it. I run and shoot and miss, and shoot and miss, over and over. The superjocks are SCREAMING at me, which makes me feel like a total dork. I keep shooting as the other team wins and is told to go change. My team has to stand there and watch me as I miss, over and over. The winning team begins to come back out of the dressing room with their street clothes on and I STILL haven’t made it. She finally tells my team that they will have to get tardy slips, and if they are unexcused they need to remember to thank me. I never made the damn shot and she finally let us go.
Luckily the secretary gave us excused tardies. 20 years later, I still hate that bitch coach.
I used to hate the way they treated some kids. A particularly sadistic gym teacher publicly humiliated one of my classmates, a fat, nervous girl who grew boobs and got her period about three years before the rest of us, when we were still having gym lessons with the boys. FNG presented SGT with a sick note from her mother, explaining that FNG had her period.
“IT’S NOT AN ILLNESS, YOU KNOW!” screams SGT, and FNG cowers and shrinks as the whole class looks at her knowingly.
Although I never had much sporting ability, I was a tall, strong-looking girl, so every time I started at a new school I was quick to be picked for teams - the first time I attended gym class. My fellow students soon realised their grave error, and soon relegated me to my rightful place - “last to be picked before the fat kids”. Gym teachers didn’t particularly like me, but I wasn’t bad enough, fat enough or weedy enough for them to pick on me either.
We had to pull sleds a few times. I have never seen these things anywhere other than my high school and those were rusty in the early 1980s, so they must be a relic from the era when corsets and giving babies arsenic were good ideas.
The sled was metal and had a poll to stack freeweights on and a harness that goes over your arms. You have to run while pulling the fucker, and in Alabama days with a heat index of 100 degrees aren’t uncommon. The football team evidently pulled them in training, but EVERYBODY in the class who wasn’t a football player and therefore used to this level of physical exercise horked their frigging guts out after doing this the first time. I’m not an expert on physical fitness, but I really don’t think vomit’s what you’re going for with an exercise.
That was what I hated most about gym. Tied for second: everything else.
Three reasons gym was a horror, all preventable and correctable, and if they had been, would have made a huge difference to my fitness level as an adult - something I struggle with.
I have severe grass allergies - I break out in welts, I itch, I wheeze, in short, I am miserable when forced to sit on grass, especially in shorts (bare legs). And yet, we did that on almost every warm day. Everybody thought I was “just itchy” and I got told to “stop faking” - presumably because people thought I was trying to get out of it.
I’m asthmatic. I used to wheeze my way through runs, but I never complained - I thought everybody had trouble. Thus, of course, I hated them. I didn’t realise that out of breath due to exertion wasn’t the same as out of breath because my asthma was flaring up. I wasn’t diagnosed until I finally had an attack that put me in the hospital in my late teens.
I have flat feet. Not fallen arches, but almost no natural arch at all. To compare, a wet left footprint by a normal person looks a bit like a “C”. Mine looks like the number “0”. This made the running required in a lot of sports (not just running, but basketball, football, anything) quite painful. I thought everybody had painful feet like that, and I was just a weak, wimpy girl and should suck it up. I did that in marching band, too - I marched many field shows in tears.
I know now that I got through a lot despite all that. Gym (and marching band, which I loved, even though I was in pain for most of it) for me was like being in a horse race where I’m the horse than drew the 200lb jockey. At the time, though, I was miserable. I wasn’t good at anything physical, so I hated it. I got teased and bullied because I sucked so bad at sports. I was so bad at marching that finally I got switched to melodic percussion and was able to stand on the sidelines for field shows, and did awesomely well. (I still had to march parade, though, which was worse, because I now had - instead of my flute - about 30lbs of bells around my neck. Can’t win, don’t try.)
If my parents, my gym teacher, my band director, if somebody had noticed that these things weren’t normal (for the record, I’m an only child, with no close relatives my age, so I had no real basis for comparison) I’d have done better. If I were more apt to complain and less apt to just keep trying, I’d have gotten help and done better. (This is a trait that is both a blessing and a curse for me today, my lack of ability to ask for help and complain when things aren’t right. I still just keep my head down and my bum up and keep tilting at that windmill.)
So yeah, gym was horrible, but I can’t blame my teachers. In fact, my social studies/gym teacher in 8th grade was thebestteacher ever, bar none, he has an elementary school in my old town named for him, and he passed away a few years ago. Mr. Vencil Brown, you rocked!
In my youth I was a pretty good footballer, played in goal for the B team and we won the inter-schools cup 2 years running thanks to my brilliant keeping
The 3rd year I was picked to play for the A team. In our first game I conceded 6 goals, in the 2nd game 7 went past me.
None went past me in the 3rd match 'cos I was dropped and sent back to the B team.
I remember there were two kids in my Grade 5 class who were pretty slow. The teacher would berate them if they couldn’t demostrate a math problem correctly on the blackboard. I mean, she’d just rip in to them, yelling “NO! That’s wrong - that’s all wrong! Oh, you’re stupid! Why can’t you get this?” Even then, an insensitive ten-year-old brat, I felt just terrible for those kids. So did everyone else - there wasn’t so much as a titter of laughter when nasty old Mrs. Bruder (And that’s her real name and I don’t care) would do that. If you tripped and fell in front of the whole class you’d get laughed at, but nobody would laugh at the way those kids were treated because it was just too awful even for kids to laugh at. I’d much rather have someone push me around than be humiliated the way those kids were.
Later on, in high school, I remember being in one class that was - presumably for logistical reasons - a mix of “Advanced” stream kids and “Intermediate” stream. It was the nature of Ontario high schools then that most kids were in the so-called Advanced stream, so it wasn’t really advanced, and Intermediate was for kids who were reasonably slow. (There was also “Basic,” which was for kids with fairly bad learning disabilities.)
Anyway, in this one class was a really nice guy who I’ll call Mike. Mike was a hell of an athlete, on several school teams. His brother, in fact, became a big time NHL star; Mike wasn’t that good but he was pretty good. But he was slow, and whenever tests got handed back I’d be looking at 96% or something - it was an easy class - and I’d peek over, and Mike got 29%. And every time he’d look absolutely, totally crushed. He was trying, but he couldn’t keep up. He tried to put a brave face on it - he was usually a happy, jovial kid - but you could tell it was hurting him.
