In elementary and middle school, we would also learn the rules and get tested on them via written tests or tests of the actual skills. Giving it a good try even if your technique didn’t result in something awesome earned you an A.
I also had the “learn it in small pieces that eventually made a sport” method instilled in PE classes. In elementary school, it was more about learning simple games, cooperative play, and the physical skills to be able to perform in the sports we started learning around 4th and 5th grade. Once we hit 6th grade, the genders were segregated and we had a wide variety of sports and athletic activities that we’d learn and execute. The final for my 7th and 8th grade PE class was to come up with a 20 minute workout routine based on all of the skills that we’d learned thus far, and to use as few accessories as possible. (Water bottles/jugs and the like could be used as freeweights.) It was really helpful in developing an understanding and appreciation of physical activity without being forced into “sport vs. non-sport” groupings.
It occurred to me once, while attempting to formulate my own version of one of those “cricket for Americans” introductory guides, that I have no idea how I came to understand the rules of cricket. I have literally only played the game twice, and have never had any great interest in it. But I can follow match reports effortlessly, and could probably even bluff my way through a discussion of the Duckworth-Lewis method.
I think it’s like learning a native language. If you grow up in a place where it is part of the culture, you just absorb it, like it or not.
I asked a similar question here a few years ago, because I had never had the rules explained to me and I could never figure out why everyone but me knew how to play baseball, football, etc. Then my daughter took up softball and baseball, and I figured I need to learn this game if I’m going to watch it and enjoy it. So I read the wiki on baseball and posted here, and got lots of good insight from posters here. Then I watched my first ball game on TV–constantly pausing and rewinding to try and figure out what I’d missed.
Now we watch baseball all the time, and can’t wait until the minor league team in our area starts up again next month. But growing up there was never any attempt that I recall to teach us anything, and yet everyone but me seemed to just somehow know the rules already when we played in gym.
All through later elementary and middle school we had instructional classes that taught moves and scoring for a large variety of games. We were tested on mechanics, but I don’t think the tests mattered that much. Off the top of my head, I remember soccer, basketball, basic gymnastics, baseball, badminton, volleyball, track/sprinting, football and archery being taught. They would arrange it in chunks of weeks where you could pick the sport you wanted, but you had to rotate after a few weeks to learn something else.
When we started high school, there was one required semester of general PE that was only running and basketball, but other optional PE electives were sport specific and it was assumed you’d already know how to play them.
I didn’t realize this was so uncommon; I was kind of a nerdy kid, but I still enjoyed sports a lot. I wonder if this model helped foster that?
The only time the rules were explained was when we played dodgeball. All the other sports we were left to our own devices. Since no one in my family is into sports, and all the other boys scorned me I usually stayed out of it altogether or hung out with the girls (who were also similarly scorned for not knowing how to play). I only learned the rules of baseball when I joined a team in middle school.
Huh, I didn’t realize this was such a universal experience. Our PE teachers never taught us any of the rules for any game, and my dad certainly never taught me anything in this regard. So imagine my delight the first time we played football and I had -zero- idea what I was supposed to be doing… but it seemed like everyone else already knew how to play, so… uh… I didn’t care too much for PE class.
Eh, I grew up in a place where sports were part of the culture and didn’t absorb anything. I just never played any sports outside of gym class growing up. My brothers & male cousins are all alot (10+yrs) older than me, my father isn’t into sports (other than Nascar and tractor pulling), most of my friends growing up were girls, and I never watched sports on TV. I’d literely never seen a football game when in freshmen gym our teacher led all the balls out to a field, had us divide into 2 teams, assigned positions, and sent us out on the field. IIRC the only intructions he gave us were about the difference between touch and tackle football and warning us that this was touch football and he wouldn’t tolerate tackling. I don’t think he believed me when I told I didn’t have clue what I was doing.
I don’t necessarily have specific memories of rules being explained to me, since most of my sports-playing started very early. It’s like I knew not to touch a soccer ball with my hands or to dribble a basketball while moving since birth. I also watched a lot, so I probably absorbed rules from that.
However, what I never got from parents, coaches, or PE teachers was strategy or tactics. It was mostly, “Here’s a soccer ball. Kick it, don’t touch it. Keep it inside these lines, and try to kick it into that big net. Now go play!” I knew the rules, but I didn’t really know what was going on.
This was a big problem in Pop Warner football. I was lost on the field. As a defensive back, I knew to catch or knock down the ball, and tackle. Nobody ever told me how. Where to stand, who to cover, how to dodge blocks and come up in run-support, etc.
Maybe that’s why I’m obsessed with gaining deep knowledge of sports tactics more than the rulebook.
Hmmm… I don’t recall any PE teachers ever explicitly explaining the rules. I seemed to have picked them up from playing some sports in the neighborhood, from my sister and the kid next door (a boy about my age). I didn’t have a very deep understanding of most major sports.
Until I discovered boys. By high school, I had resigned myself to think of me as decidedly non-athletic and left it at that. But then boys wanted to take you to football games for dates. I was raised by a guy who played football and wrestled in high school, and who also raced motorcycles. (Turns out, my dad is kind of a jock, though I’d never thought of anyone in our family as athletic.) So when I was a sophomore in high school, I was eating lunch every day with this group of boys who were constantly talking about football and cars. On the car topics – I’d been hanging around gearheads my entire life – I was comfortable and easily able to participate in the discussions (which those boys *loved *because I was the only girl they knew at the time who was both A) Cute and B) knowledgeable about cars). So I went to my dad one day and said, “Hey the Ohio State game is on in a few minutes. We’ve both got all our chores done. Will you come watch this game with me and explain it so I can talk about football more intelligently with the boys at school?”
He was pretty amused at my motive, but he was delighted to sit down and explain to me what a “down” is and so forth. I ended up doing that with him to learn a couple other sports because I learned that being able to talk about Boy Topics with Boys makes a girl one very hot commodity. But note: I had no interest in playing any of these sports and rarely do I play any kind of team sport for fun. If I do anything athletic, it’s usually a fairly solitary thing, like paddling.
I learned football by going to game after game (after game after game) when my brother (a star football player) and I were in high school.
Baseball I just sort of figured out; however I have (almost literally) watched at least a few innings every day of every summer from the time Grandpa bounced me on his knee as a little tot, well through adulthood.
Soccer doesn’t seem to need much explanation (IMHO). Kick the ball into your opponent’s goal. Pretty straightforward. I understand offsides (I couldn’t explain it, but I understand it in a I-know-it-when-I-see-it sense). I don’t fully understand what situations lead to a corner kick, a free kick on goal, a card (kick an opposing player in the nuts = yellow card; look at a player the wrong way = red card ), etc., but I don’t see enough games to develop a full understanding.
So, I came to Canada (from Scotland) just before I turned 6. I started school here in grade 1.
On one of the first recesses we played baseball. There I was standing in the field and a ball was hit to me.
“Throw it! Throw it!” They all yelled. So I did. I hit the base runner on the head with the ball. How the hell was I supposed to know who to throw the ball to? What’s a first baseman?
Other than games in the baseball family (baseball, softball, kickball) I never did understand the rules of team games. When they roped us all into playing football in junior high, I was always being told I was “clipping” but nobody ever told me what that meant. And in basketball, someone was always telling me I fouled them, but again, that was never defined for me.
Actually, I take that back: it was explained to us in soccer what ‘offsides’ was, and the rest of the rules that matter are pretty simple.
No one explained the rules to me, but I looked them up. There are kid friendly books for every sport, and they were all in even my elementary school’s closet of a library. And, even then, we kids would often decide that we weren’t going to enforce certain rules–sometimes even not enforcing scoring.
I do remember later on, after all that had happened, that coaches would tell you the rules as you needed them. I always thought that made more sense that trying to memorize them all. Most rules aren’t even relevant to amateur games, really.
BTW, I did recently learn that, unlike the way we always played the game, you score on the rally in volleyball. It doesn’t matter if you served or not. If the other team knocks the ball out of bounds or doesn’t return your return or serve, you get a point.
One last thing: I liked our soccer better than real soccer. The net was a fence, and was small enough that the goalie’s head went above it. Being able to kick the ball above the goalie’s head always struck me as an unfair move.
Mixed. When we were introduced to a new sport, we had the basics explained to us – but only the basics. To this day I’ve no real idea how a cricket match actually works beyond the most elementary level.
Certainly no explanation of tactics, or positional play, and no skills training or coaching of any sort: if you didn’t immediately grasp how to do something after being shown it once you were screwed, because that’s all you were going to get.
I did manage to pick up that it’s “offside” though.
Years and years ago a good friend and I decided we were going to watch a cricket game (match?) on TV over a case of beer.
It was the funniest damned thing ever. For the life of us, we could not figure out how the game worked or what the rules were. It was like learning fizzbin.
Is it? I’ve only sat in the stands and listened to people crying “Off sides!” (okay, I guess it’s one word) or listened to my British ex-husband yell that while watching soccer. Never heard “offside,” singular.