And how did you feel about it?
When I was very young, 1st or 2nd grade, I didn’t really know how to play any sports and didn’t pick up the skills right away. It bothered me a little, but it also prompted me to learn and practice until I got better. But I was never the type to get picked first very often either.
I remember a new kid coming to elementary school, very quiet, seemingly timid. He got picked last when we started our baseball season, the last few weeks of school on Friday afternoons. He didn’t look good in practice, but in the first game he knocked one way out in center field. He started getting picked first after that. That’s an unusual circumstance I think, but timidity may often be a reason a kid gets picked last, and if he doesn’t perform after that it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I wouldn’t normally be the last, but definitely the back of the pack. It didn’t bother me too much, though, for two reasons:
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The person doing the picking was usually some popular, sporty kid and would pick their mates first - it was more about who was popular than who was good at sports. I was never one of the popular pack, and didn’t really care to be either.
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I was never really that interested in sports anyway, so to be fair I was never really that good. If I got picked last and put in some position where I didn’t have to do much, that was fine with me. I’d rather have been in the library messing about with the computers there anyway (yes, I was a geeky kid
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This is a tough one for me to answer succinctly.
I didn’t mind getting picked last. I’d pick me last. I was a fat kid, and crap at sports.
What I minded was being forced to play in the first place, and the teasing that came because of being picked last. There was teasing around me and the boy who also was fat and crap at sports and was picked next to last, and how we should get married and have fat babies who’d be crap at sports.
Look, I don’t want to be on your team any more than you want me on it. If I had my way I’d be back on that wall with my book. I am not the cause of your kickball woes.
My revenge came on vocabulary test days.
Oh yeah, that was my life. Not only was I the last one picked for stickball or punchball, when it was my turn to bat, you could bet the captain would announce “NBO (new batting order),” meaning I wouldn’t get to bat that inning (or any other, if the captain could help it).
Why would any of us be HERE if we weren’t? Sheeeesh.
The only sport we ever chose sides for was dodgeball, and I was good at dodgeball, so I was not picked anywhere near last.
It wasn’t cutthroat dodgeball, by the way. We were a sedate bunch.
I wasn’t always picked last, but definitely towards the end. Being among the scraps didn’t bother me, like gwendee says, I’d have picked me last. I’m not going to fault the chooser for having a brain.
But it did bug me that I was small and bad at sports. I would have enjoyed them more if I weren’t so consistently outclassed.
In elementary and through junior high school, I was often the last picked because I was so small. I hated it because I wanted to be athletic and robust (and in hindsight I actually was those things…just really short too).
I took on a little height, finally, around 10th grade. And while there were no colleges bashing down my door with scholarship offers, I did end up being a multi-sport athlete in high school, and probably thought of by my classmates as a semi-sporty guy. Which is all I’d ever wanted anyway.
Yeah, being picked for sports is mostly about sporty kid picking all his friends first, not actual ability. I was decent at sports like field hockey, baseball, and dodgeball, and slowly moved from picked last to picked in the middle for those sports (but one of the last few in everything else, especially running). I didn’t even want to play though so it was just a chore to get through regardless. Woopee, I’m considered okay at a sport I don’t even like or want to play, wooooo. Or the opposite, yep, I know I can’t run well coach, thanks for making a two-team competition out of the class for running, now they actually have a reason to make fun of me (bringing down the team).
Gym was better when they just tossed a bunch of equipment out and said “everyone do what you want” Or: obstacle course.
Asthmatic and wore glasses as a kid. I wasn’t terribly coordinated at sports, didn’t know the rules, and didn’t get why we were playing anyway because it wasn’t fun to me at all.
I was ok at ballet, jazz, and karate. In middle school, I found that I could run like the wind in short bursts (less than 1/4 mile distances). But sports like volleyball, softball, kickball? Awful, Just, bad. Anything that could possibly break my glasses was horrible, because my mother just carried on for weeks about the cost and how irresponsible I was.
Horrible, I’m so glad I’m not a kid and can get out of playing sports.
Me, too, gwendee. And there is a special place in hell for teachers who wouldn’t let kids just do their own thing at recess, but made us book-readers go “play”. I am relaxing by reading this book, goddammit!
I went ahead and answered “sometimes” though I’m not sure I was ever dead last. If there were 15 people lined up, I was probably picked third from the last. I was big and strong, but clumsy as hell. I was more likely to get picked sooner for something like baseball (where I mostly played catcher and was damn good at it by little league standards) than something like soccer (where the idea of kicking a moving ball while running still seems impossible to me).
I was not particularly bothered by it. I knew my strengths didn’t lie with sports. I spent all of third grade recesses reading Tolkien and designing a space station to be placed on Pluto.
My father on the other hand… seriously, nothing I do will ever make up for my lack of getting a football scholarship to pay for medical school. He wanted a jock doctor and got stuck with an accountant. The fact that I wasn’t at the top of the heap was a sore point for him.
Anecdote though: when playing dodgeball the jocks would always get way too out of hand, but the teacher allowed it. We played free-form last-one-standing dodgeball in that there were no sides. We did not play with foam dodgeballs but rubber ones. So one day a jock came up beside one of the kids with glasses and as hard as he could slammed that dodgeball into his face. The kid started bleeding from the glasses being rammed into his face (at least the glass did not break) and the teacher never allowed the jocks to get out of hand again or that jock to play dodgeball again. It’s too bad it took that much for the teacher to actually maintain control though.
edited: my poor reading comprehension
I was usually picked last. It never bothered me for a couple of reasons. I knew I wasn’t interested in athletics and only had modest skills. However, I made the most of what I could do and was better than most people realized.
Never picked last, but I was an odd kind of “awkward,” athletically, where I wasn’t any good at the sports I enjoyed (basketball, soccer), and really good at the sports that I loathed (football, baseball), so I got a lot of “Well, Reluctant A. isn’t any good at basketball, but we should pick him, because he’s really fast, and he jumps high, and he’ll make one good play out of five, just by being able to beat everybody else down the court.”
Never got picked first, either: I was usually bigger, faster and stronger than the other kids my age, but I was also spectacularly uncoordinated. Couldn’t shoot, had no handles, and I was a turnover waiting to happen.
I was blessed by grade school standards when it came to sports and games. I was well-coordinated by about 4th grade, getting my growth spurt much earlier than most. I was too tall to be much of a sprinter, but for all other games I was always at the top of the list.
Don’t worry, though, my bloodthirsty little peers still found plenty of faults to excoriate me for. I wasn’t pretty or popular, I was too tall and always had my nose in a book, and I was fiercely competitive which wasn’t considered an attractive trait for a girl back in the day. Thankfully, I was a supremely confident child and none of that bothered me until puberty came along.
Everything except two:
Softball, I did a couple of things fairly well and capitalized on them.
Dodgeball, couldn’t throw or catch but I could dodge. Sometimes, it was demanded that I allow myself to be hit so another game could start.
I went to a Catholic school for 8 years and we had zero physical education, so I didn’t know how to play any team sports. I knew the rules for baseball, but knowing the rules doesn’t count for much if you don’t know how to play on a team.
So when I ended up in a public school in 9th grade, I was so far behind the curve, it was pretty pathetic. And in PE class, I was among the last ones chosen for any team. As a result, I didn’t get a lot of play time, hence I never learned to play on a team, hence I was always picked near last. And we won’t even talk about pickup volleyball games at picnics - other players would go out of their way to jostle me aside so they could return the ball.
I hate team sports.
But I was pretty good at tennis and racquetball in my younger days.
Yes, I was always among the last. Never the absolute last, but close to the end. It bothered me a bit, but I knew I wasn’t athletic or good at the activities, so why should not getting picked be a surprise?
The one exception was the handball unit in 8th grade. For some reason, I was really good at being a goalie. I have no idea why. The dregs of my splinter skills somehow coalesced into this one fleeting talent during that unit and I was almost never scored on. And to my surprise, the other kids noticed after the first day or two. And for the remainder of the unit, I was among the first picked instead of the last. It even caused an argument one day: “Hey, come on, you got chizzuk the last two days, it’s our turn to have her this time.” It stopped as soon as we moved to the next unit, of course, but for that brief period I got a taste of what it was like on The Other Side.
Participation in sports was emphasized throughout my childhood so I felt bad if I was outside the top 3 chosen. I mean, I didn’t feel terrible and humiliated about it, but I was always very competitive. And I honestly do not believe that the last person picked was made fun of.