AS, dyspraxia and school sports...

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Most Aspies experience difficulties in relation to balance and coordination. However, in schools, we are still expected to participate in competitive sports such as football.

Recently, I have had to suffer the unfortunate experience of playing football at school. Because of the difficulties I face with coordination, people constantly criticize me, scream at me and invent some ridiculous excuses to exclude me from their team. For example, one member of the other team was absent today and when the teacher asked my team to donate one of their players. This request was met with a unanimous "Curiotical" to which the other team responded with an almost unanimous "No, god, please don't make us take him". This along with my teammates screaming incessant verbal abuse at me made me feel like a piece of s**t. I had to try exceptionally hard to hold back tears.

I'm sure that the above story will be very familiar to many you, and some of you will have experienced far worse in relation to this issue.

I acknowledge that physical exercise is important and I have no objections to participating in non-competitive forms of exercise such as cycling and weight lifting; I just cannot comprehend why teachers think it is acceptable to subject people with Asperger's and dyspraxia to this kind of treatment.

I honestly think that it's a form of discrimination to force Aspies and dyspraxic people to participate in things that are both beyond their capability and act as perpetual gateways to bullies.

What's your take on the issue?

You're touching something there. Being both clumsy and unpopular, you're always the last one to be picked when teams are formed. I've been "the last one picked" for my entire schoolyears. And I can't understand why, still, teachers create the teams by picking two "popular good at sports" leaders who will then choose in turns their teammates. There is no obvious advantage to it, and it perpetuates discrimination, isolation, rejection and, well, suffering. I find it disgusting and unthoughtful.

I am clumsy and un coordinated. I really struggled with any sport which involved having to hit / catch a ball of some sort. Bit shocked how I made it on to the second cricket team.

The worst thing is team sports, which is like social interaction sped up. I suck a lot at team basketball, but I am ackshuly purrrty good at shooting hoops. But yes, eberryone yelled at me like why can't I just do it right, but I just couldn't keep up with so many hooomans moving around me eggspecting me to put the ball where I don't even know where to put the ball I am afraid of it.

Agreed. Competitive team sports are completely overwhelming. Another thing that irritates me is being told not to be fearful of the ball. A weighted, hard object is hurtling through the air at me at a ridiculous speed - of course I'm nervous!

I always hated this. When I had to do sports in my gym class, I was always doing things wrong it seemed and I know what you mean about the ball flying at you at a high speed. I was once made fun of because I couldn't catch the ball, because I was afraid of objects flying at me for a long time. Actually, in that situation, maybe I wasn't made fun of, I think the person was extremely annoyed with me not being able to catch the ball and kept talking about it and I kind of raged about it.

I remember gym class. I told the new gym teacher after I moved that I was on her side and I thought gay people should be allowed to get married. She didn't react well to my sincere and warmhearted attempt to say something that would make her happy and thus get me on her good side, especially considering she really was gay. Did she think it was deadpan homophobia or something? I didn't learn how to be deadpan til like a year later! She also hated how I constantly made jokes about children getting injured or killed in gym class. She told me "I actually have had children break bones in this class, do you still think that's funny?" I said "No, I think that means your class is dangerous and a waste of taxpayer money". Surprise, surprise, she didn't like that either.

edit: Gym class was way better than recess, though, because it was air conditioned and after it became clear I couldn't catch a ball, period, or throw a ball through a hoop, period, or jump without falling directly onto my head, the teacher started pretending I wasn't there and I just got to sit in the back and think about the school burning down while everyone else played like they were damn children. She just gave me A's after that, but I hadn't known gym class was even graded in the first place, I figured that was absurd and likely illegal because it would mean automatically failing every handicapped person.

I don't think I was that bad at sports. I just lacked confidence, and also lacked interest, and I hated team games. The other girls used to get so bitchy in team games like netball, and they would whine at you if you lost their team by not playing it right.

The thing I hated the most was rounders. Most children loved that, but I hated it. I wasn't any good at throwing or catching or batting a ball, and I could never tell if it was a no ball or not, and so I didn't know whether to run or not, then I made a fool of myself by just standing there if I had to run, or running if I wasn't supposed to, and then the other kids kept on yelling at me. But each time I told the teachers that I didn't want to play rounders, they wouldn't listen, and forced me to get changed for PE and to play rounders.

I remember once we played a rounders sort of thing indoors, only it had different rules what I couldn't quite understand. Two of you had to run, holding each other's hands (don't know why), and lo and behold I had to run with a girl who hated me, so she wasn't too happy with having to run holding my hand. When we finished, she ran back up to her friends and said, ''God, I had to run with her!'' and I tried to make the bully feel better by saying, ''maybe you will run with someone better than me next time'', but nobody heard me say that (goes to show how ignored I was!)

My take on it is that you go to school to be educated, not to be forced into playing rugby in freezing icy conditions, or made to run "cross country" until your legs turned to jelly. I managed to secure a note from the doctor excusing me from participating in any further "physical eduction".. I guess I was lucky.

Okay, to whomever voted "yes"; you should be ashamed of yourself. You obviously don't have any of the balance/coordination issues associated with AS. In fact, due to your blatantly heartless attitude, I highly doubt that you are on the spectrum at all.

If you are a parent of an Autistic child; I suggest that you alter your insensitive and potentially harmful attitude. If you were trolling; please just go away. I don't imagine that anyone here finds you remotely amusing.

Exactly. Sports are of no educational value whatsoever. As much as I despise it, I do tolerate football for the sake of keeping out of trouble, but one sport I'd never participate in is rugby. Aside from with those close to me, I try to avoid physical contact. Rugby involves full-on, potentially injurious physical contact. Violence is discouraged in school, so I don't see why this "game" should be viewed as being acceptable.



I wouldn't want to completely opt out of physical education. There are some aspects that I enjoy, such as weight lifting and using fitness machinery. My argument is with mandatory competitive sports but, given that you hated every aspect of it, I'm glad that you were able to stop participating.

I did enjoy some PE lessons, ones where we didn't have teams, like gym and swimming. But team games were so daunting. I suppose it was worse for boys on the spectrum to do sports like rugby and football, all in the mud and the cold, because boys usually go stupid over sports, and boys sports were much more intense than girls sports.

But indoor PE was much easier for me. I loved swimming, although I couldn't swim properly because I had medical issues with my ears and sinuses and so wasn't allowed to get my head under water, but even so I still loved swimming. And gym was fun too, when we just done activities like climbing on those big aperatus things and using those blue mats, and using running machines and weight-lifting and so on. Those were fun because we didn't really have teams. I also didn't mind dancing, which we sometimes did. Although I wasn't very good at it, I still didn't mind it. I just hated netball, hockey and rounders.

Even if we did sports like babminton and other sports where we had to have partners, I still didn't mind because the other girls didn't get so aggressive like they did in team sports. They took team games so seriously.

Yeah at the time I hated all of it, even the non competitive stuff, I was just put off any kind of physical activity. Since then as an adult I've learned to appreciate stuff like cycling or just walking and I did have a period where I tried a bit of light weight lifting (at home).

Sorry to hear about your troubles in this area, hope things get better for you.

For the past nine years, I've always been in mixed gender classes which weren't so bad because I wasn't the only one who lacked enthusiasm for sport. This is the first time I have been in an exclusively male class and I hate it.

Really? Your school graded PE?! That is absurd and I sincerely hope that it does not happen today.

I don't think PE is graded based on how good you are at physical activities, at least it was not like that at my school anyway. The class was graded based on whether or not students at least tried to participate and I think with information provided by a parent or doctor, anyone could get permission to choose not to participate in activities that they were not able to do.