Forced Athletics in School

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At the schools I went to, we not only had gym class, but we were also required to play "extracurricular" competetive sports. That meant staying after school for two hours every day to play on a team. I didn't care about the sports so I don't pay attention. As a result, the coaches and other kids yelled at me all the time. Because there weren't enough fields, the girls had to play soccor in the winter. Those experiences, and gym class, made me hate anything athletic, until I started hiking many years later.

I'm not well coordinated and I have poor depth perception thanks to lazy eye. So sports involving balls are largely guess work for me, when it comes to where the ball is in space. I can't throw either, some girls threw better than I could. My stamina was poor, all the stop and go running required in most sports wore me out quickly. Though I could run laps pretty decent, I was usually between the middle group and the lagging group.
I've never enjoyed physical competition.

I did enjoy riding my bike(It took forever to learn to balance), and swimming. I couldn't get the hang of rollerskating or skateboarding, my legs trembled to much. I also liked playing catch(no more than 30 ft apart) with a football, shooting hoops, and badminton all played with family, and I enjoyed taekwondo, until they assigned me a young instructor that pushed me to hard and was teaching me the wrong kata for orange belt qualification(I made it to yellow belt, that's the second belt).

Now I mostly use my exercise bike(30 min. a day, 2-3 times a week) and do some stretches/pushups whenever I feel like it.

PE effectively ruined me on most sports... I think forcing unathletic kids to play with peers who are more athletic and way too competitive is cruel and demoralizing. I can't even bring myself to play a sport with friends at get togethers because I fear being griped at for not hitting the volleyball or attempting to hit the ball when it came to me (the reason was combination of knowing that hitting it would be painful and also not knowing exactly where the ball was going until it hit the ground). PE was a nightmare for me. When the fitness majors were offering there services as personal trainers on campus the only thing keeping me from taking advantage of it was this subconscious fear that it would be like PE all over again and I would be made fun of for my lack of athletic skill. I believe there should be other alternatives for kids who are unathletic to get exercise in school without being chastised and ridiculed by their peers.

Oh come on guys and girls.....sports are not so bad.

When I was in high school I played 6 different sports and they were all fun .

I do wish that physical activity be required in schools, but I agree with most people here that it can be very difficult to have a worthwhile experience playing a particular sport that others are much better at. I've had that experience with basketball as long as I've had P.E.

But with that said, I still play on sports teams competitively. My big sport right now is Track & Field, where I made varsity marks my freshman year in jumping and sprinting. In fact, just last year I was on the school-record-breaking 4x400m relay team. I'm definitely thankful for my athletic ability, though, because I do find sports entertaining and rewarding and am aware that not everybody gets the same privilege to do what I do.

Got by without anyone noticing I had AS so far (I'm in my first year of high school).

I was quite athletic even though most ppl at skool thought i was s**t but i had always wanted 2 prove dem wrong n at da end of da day i was a good goal kepper got selected in a skool cricket team n top scorer in skool field hockey matches.

anyone else here agree on my theory that physical ability doesent mean anything... theoretically we could still all be successfull humans if we were all just brains in vats...

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I could have done extremely well in gym class, if it weren't for my heart defect. All the gym teacher seemed to care about was endurance; how long we could run, how many laps we could swim. I have no endurance whatsoever, so running and swimming laps is something I simply cannot do. I failed the swimming course because I was slow and needed to rest a lot, and the teacher wouldn't accept "I have a hole in my heart where there shouldn't be one" as an excuse.

I don't think it's quite fair that I failed gym. After all, I did well enough in team sports. I have a good throwing arm and good reflexes. I can catch a ball very well. I was on a volleyball team for three years. I kicked ass at badminton and tennis. I can kick a ball, I have good aim. I'm well-muscled and had a very low body fat percentage in high school. I'm a fast short-distance runner. But, I failed the mile run, and therefore failed gym. Eventually I got a doctor's excuse and was able to skip gym class, thank goodness.

You could say that they don't accept that because they don't even understand what the ultrasound is supposed to show. Or that they don't understand enough about the heart to understand that you have a problem with it. In which case, they shouldn't even be teaching gym class.

I hated PE at primary school because it was so competitive. It was made up entirely of sports that require a lot of running around in the freezing cold (I don't remember ever doing PE in the summer!), which I couldn't do because I'm asthmatic.

However, by the time I reached Year 10 and 11, we could pick, which meant lovely sports like badminton, table tennis and "weights". It also meant that I picked all the sports that had none of the bitchy girls and all of the all-star boys, which meant that when I was terrible, nobody cared.

I was also lucky enough to be in a tutor group with the least sporty people in the year, which meant that we could enter inter-form competitions purely for fun, as we had no chance of winning.

I think sport can be fun, as long as you're playing it with people who are at about the same level, or are just doing it for fun. I'm sure it's fun to compete if you're good at it, but there should be separate "just for fun" competitions for people who are rubbish.

She (and probably many other gym teachers, I might add) have no right to be gym teachers then. If they don't even understand any basic physiology, there's no way in hell they're going to understand how you "build stamina". I think that's something gym teachers need to learn, and that should become part of their qualifications. PHYSIOLOGY.

You can't become a gym teacher just because you have the brawns for it and know how to play sports.

Amen to that. Phys Ed is also the one subject where teachers are not supposed to grade based on performance, but solely on effort, and yet they ignore that and base scores on performance anyway. The Presidential Fitness Exam screwed me over too, since my scoliosis makes it nearly impossible for me to to sit-ups.

Unfortunately, "remedial gym" at my high school was meant for the special ed students, and I would have been the only one in the class who wasn't mentally ret*d. (I know not everyone in special ed is mentally handicapped at all schools, but at my high school they were) They should either have an in-between sort of class for mainstream students with physical problems, or make gym class optional.