I must be one of the few athletic people who hated gym in high school. I was on the swimming team and did springboard diving in high school. I also did a lot of other sport type activities outside school. Of course, you can probably see a pattern. All the things I did even as a kid were individual sports, not team sports. Gym in high school wasn’t 100 percent shit, but it wasn’t that much fun.
In middle school we had a couple of good teachers and they separated us by ability; A, B, and C groups. A group had the kids with the best fitness, based on various tests, while C group had the worst overall fitness. I had been doing gymnastics for a couple of years at that point so I was in great shape. Group A did things like cross-country runs, archery, and sometimes team sports.
I didn’t like most team sports very much because, although I was very strong and fast, I was about chest-high to most other kids my age. I didn’t grow hardly at all until eighth grade. One of the games that was most fun was crab soccer. In crab soccer you weren’t allowed to stand up, you had to move around in a weird face-up crawl. It put all of us on equal footing (so to speak) because no one, including the jocks, was practiced at moving around like that.
In high school, on the other hand, there were more kids and what seemed to me to be a higher proportion of jerks. I was still on the small side and since I was never all that interested in team sports I was not good at them. I was usually picked last for most things. This was especially ironic because I was usually one of the top scorers on the fitness tests and because of gymnastics, swimming, horseback riding, archery, running, climbing, etc. I was stronger than boys who were much bigger than me. In a weightlifting class, I leg-pressed a weight that one of the football jocks, who had legs the size of my torso, could barely move. I did ten reps.
High school gym undercut my confidence. I wasn’t that confident to begin with because of being undersized for so long, but doing sports that other kids had been practicing most of their lives made me feel kind of inferior even though, looking back, I can see that I was probably in better shape than most of the jocks even. Personality and dominance had a lot to do with how things worked out.
To top it off, I had my first serious fight close to the end of freshman year. The prelude was when this guy came up behind me before class and slapped me in the back of the head. He said that I had touched him during a game and that he was going to beat me up after class for it. Basically, he was reaching for some excuse to beat someone up, though I didn’t realize that at the time. I hadn’t done anything to actually warrant his attack.
After class, he and two henchmen, members of a wannabe gang, did try to beat me up. I ran, and they chased me through the halls until one of them got close enough to grab my pack and pull me off my feet. The main guy was a head taller and close to two years older than me. Gotta love the bully mentality. I managed to keep his buddies from holding me and I was fast enough to dodge most of his hits. A couple of teachers finally came, broke it up, and he was expelled since he had already been in trouble a few times before that.
While I didn’t get beaten up, and while I should have given myself more credit for how I handled the fight, it undercut my confidence. It was a shock to me that someone would want to fight for no particular reason and I was so upset by the unfairness of it and the stress of the fight that I cried when I got to my next class. That didn’t help the whole social-standing thing. This fight made me more cautious in my interactions with others, particularly during gym. Of course, it also made me determined to learn how to fight. If I hadn’t been an outsider of sorts in gym and if I hadn’t had that fight, I might never have started taking martial arts. So at least one good thing came out of it; martial arts training has become a more or less permanent part of my life.
I think that gym was one of the reasons that I was pretty anti-social for my sophomore year. It wasn’t until the end of my junior year that I got some good friends, built up my social life and my confidence, and started to feel like a person instead of a loser. I’m very glad gym was only required for two years.