How would you describe your experiences in shcool (grades 1-12) with
regard to sports?  I've been thinking of the sedintary life that I, and
countless other people leave.  We either sit on the phone and talk to
people to make things happen, or stare at CRT's and push electrons about
to do things.  For more and more people, "an honest days work" is less
physical and more mental, to the point that some people I know gripe at
having to walk 5 minutes to get the occaisonal prinout.

   How all this is changing us isn't quite the focus of this item--but I
*am* interested in what the educational system did to you (or with you)
to help you keep your body fit.  I remember in the early 60's, the
"presidents counsel on fitness" and having fitness drives back then, so
it seems to have occured to some governmental types that it would be a
good idea to keep kids fit.

   But has it worked?  I'm not sure at all.  I'll be interested to see
if people that went through the public school mills fared any differently
than those who went to private schools.

69 responses total.

The neighborhood I grew up in and my father were much more influential
than my school experiences.  In my neighborhood, there were eight to
ten of us who would get together for baseball, basketball, football,
or street hockey, depending on what professional season was happening
at the time.  My father encouraged us to take part in athletics as he
played high school baseball and basketball as a kid.

Looking back, I doubt that phys ed classes would have much success in
encouraging kids tostay fit later in life.  They tended to concentrate
on teaching kids how to play sports, and mine had no training in nutrition.
Perhaps classes are better these days.

   Actually, it is my own negative experience that makes me ask not what
good things the school system can instill in children, but can they stop
turning them off so completely?

   My experience at Angell school (elementary) Tappan (Jr high) & Huron high
goes like this.  I grew up without my father; I lost him when I was 6.  So
I didn't have a "dad" to coach me through the years of learning about
sports like all the other kids did.  I mean all, too.  I'd say nearly all
the girls at Angell knew more about, and were probably better at most sports
events than I was.

   So the first thing I came across was the simple fact that I didn't *know*
the rules of say, football.  When we tried the pull-tag variety, I just
didn't know what to do.  Granted I learned something by watching others,
but I couldn't get direct answers about how the game worked from the
"coach" at Angell.  Either he didn't belive me when I said I didn't know,
or it made him uncomfortable to explain, but I could not get direct help
from my supposed educator(s).  For football and basketball at least, I
was able to get to the public library and finally I found a book that
explained the rules about a number of games.

   A continuing problem I saw was the incredible amount of cheating that
went on, with the teacher being a) brain dead, b) not caring one way or
the other, c) being paid to not notice.  Now, I was never a good student
in the athletic areas, but I always tried to what was asked.  Do you remember
when it rained, having to run around the gym some number of times before
other things could happen?  I do, because I was always, always one of the
last few people running around, trying to get in the required number of
laps before sitting down.  The joy I felt in having everyone look at me
as I plodded around, alone, isn't something I care to go over, much.
   After some months of this crud one year, (think it was second grade), I
came to the conclusion that a lot of people were cheating in that if they
raced at high speed around the gym once or twice, they were seen as the
"quick runners" and could then slow down and get to their sitting place
and plop down with lots of others still running.  After a while I got so
that I knew how much people had run before they sat down, and went to
my teacher about it.  Not the gym teacher, but my regular teacher.  She
agreed to look into it and noticed one day during running that there were
a lot of people who had sat down rather quickly.  And there I was, plodding
along, alone again as usual.  My regular teacher had a talk with the gym
instructor and he was rather surprised that any one would do such a thing.
He said he'd never noticed anything wrong, but would look into it.  He
never did, and I was always the last person at any form of running event.

   At Tappan, we carried on just like before, except there was a vicious
tone to the games that I hadn't seen before.  If I got the ball (game
being irrelevant) I was sure to do something wrong and get the other people
on my team mad at me.  Once, there was a particularly abusive person yelling
at me when I lost the ball (football) and came over screaming at what an
asshole I was.  I finally lost it, and socked him in the mouth.  This did
three things: a) scared the shit out of the idiot, who never, ever yelled
at me again, b) got the interest of my supposed educational instructor,
who finally, after an hour and a half session got the idea that the sports
system wasn't particularly sportsmanlike at Tappan and c) got me reassigned
to a different gym class that wasn't quite as bad.  There was still no
instruction, and there were only blank stares when I asked if we would be
getting any "instuctions" on how to play things.  The public library, and
sometimes Tappan's library came to the rescue several times.  But I still
couldn't get the help I needed to really understand things, or help in
*learning how to play anything*.  We did run on rainy days however, and
this time, being in a larger group I found to my amazement that there
were people ever slower than I.

   High school was about as inane, except for the fact that there was a
course called "lifetime sports" in which you got to try things like
bad mitten(sp?), golf, etc.  The idea being that you might find something
that you might want to do later on in life.  Except for the completely
insane part that if you missed class for any reason, you had to run six
laps at the track (mind you, this is the outdoor Huron track).  So when
the bus I took to get me from Community to Huron was late, six laps.  The
designer of this little trick has since left the Ann Arbor school system
and it likely torturing people at his current place, Eastern.
 
   That, in a nutshell, is the sum total of my sports experiences in
the Ann Arbor school system.  It taught me: a) cheat.  You probably
won't get caught.  b)Winning is what is important, not how you go about
it.  Use rule a).  c) You have to know how to play the game already,
in order to play the game.  You can't not play the game or get out of
it.

   So I wonder how much better off I'd be today, if I hadn't had such
a *completely* negative exposure to sports in general.  Every person is
responsible for their own health, I know.  But I wonder how much more
active I would be today, how much more willing to play in sports today
if only I had some help in that area.  Thank God for walking and bike
riding.

It sounds like part of the problem with your phys ed classes were the
size.  It's hard enough for teachers to supervise kids when they are
supposed to be sitting down and learning much less when they are
running around and playing.

Maybe one of the things they have to do (and maybe they are doing it 
already) is divorce sports and competition from physical fitness.  For
many people, exercise means engaging in some athletic activity.  Since
they may not be real athletically inclined, they are not likely to do
them.

Another thing, obviously, is to adopt a more humane approach to
sports.  I attended a Catholic grade school.  At our school, we had a
"little league" sports system that required coaches to teach all of
the kids how to play the game, and also required that coaches play all
of the players in each game.  

When I was in college, I went back and coached a basketball team one
year.  I honestly tried to make it fun for all the kids, while at the
same time trying to win.

RE #2, (He still doesn't know the difference between a home-run and a
touch down.  We must be one of the few families in the US where the wife
has to explain what is going on in a game to the husband :-)

Would one rather play dodge ball or watch a movie on TV?

[This item is linked from '-ing' 11 to sports 24]

        I was discouraged from sports before high school, too, because, try
though I might (and I did try), I was never very good at any of them.  The
gym classes became, for me, another place where I could be abused by the
other kids, only with the approval and cooperation of the teachers.  I
couldn't throw a dodge ball hard; I could dodge it, though; finally it
became the biggest kid on one side, and me on the other, with him getting
madder and madder and throwing harder and harder.  And then he had another
excuse to beat me up at recess.
        In high school I finally grew to be the same size as the other kids,
but they had years of background in being good at sports, and I didn't.
It didn't matter what my skills were.  By then they were normal, but no
one believed it.  I could throw a football 60-70 yards and was still the
last kid picked for a team, to be put on the offensive line so I wouldn't
hurt my team's chances to win.
        I didn't play high school sports.  It was obvious to me that I
wouldn't get to play.  I would get to practice, and then warm the bench
for all the games.  (I was the statistician and equipment manager for the
baseball team, though, for my final two years.)
        In college, no one cared or knew who I was, and in gym classes I got
to play (and even succeed, sometimes) in volleyball and tennis.  I still
play both those games recreationally.  I'm in the rec volleyball leagues i
Ann Arbor, and play tennis during the summer with friends and relatives.
        If I could go back and erase all the experiences I had with sports
before I was 18, I'd do it in a minute.  It was hell.

STeve, I could enter much the same paragraph as you did.  I attended
Angell/Tappan/Huron, and until my father had open heart surgery when
I was in 8th grade, he was athletically "useless".  Football and
baseball were literally foreign to him, as might have been basketball.

My development was a bit different, though.  In 1-3rd grades, I vaguely
remember being decent at whiffle ball.  But in 4th grade I was over-seas,
and somehow never adjusted to softball upon my return.  That started the
bad years, which were only muzzled by my speed and dexterity -- which I
didn't really know how to put to use.

It was at that time that my love affair with football began.  In 1973,
for reasons I have never understood, my father purchased UM season
tickets.  I was a little bit under the weather for the first game that
year, but I think copped out as I didn't really want to go.  But I
went to the rest of the games (and haven't voluntarily missed one since).
Thus I learned the rules of football.

By 9th grade, I started playing football with half a dozen friends.  We
all became "decent", but never really good.  But it was fun.  My love
affair found a new dimension.

The real turn-around, however, came in 11th grade, when the captain of
the football and track teams told me I should join the track team (oddly
enough, just yesterday I thought to send him a thank-you note for doing
that -- in a minute you'll see why I hadn't thought of thanking him
until now).  After some stubborness, I figured I'd give it a try, and
for the next year and a half I ran 10-14 miles at leat 5 times a week
(thank him for that?).

Then came college.  My freshman year I was still in good enough shape
to participate in IM track and football.  My speed and endurance had
increased, and I had learned more about the mechanics of football --
learning to be at the right place in the right time.  I stopped running
regularly about then, but still participate in IM football (despite no
longer being a student).

So here I am today.  I find that I still have better speed and endurance
than the average UofM IM football player, and while I am no longer in the
"peak condition" I was at high school, I hold my own.  After Thanksgiving,
I noticed that I was about 10 pounds too heavy.  I put myself on a crash
work-out (3 times a week) and was more careful about what I ate, and lost
those pounds in a hurry.

As I get older (and busier with other pursuits), it gets more and more
difficult to stay fit.  It has become increasingly harder to "get up to
speed" if I let-down for a while.  But all-in-all, I think that year
and a half at the end of high school taught me a lot.  And not just
about my body.  As they say, "Winners don't quit; quitters don't win".
It takes a lot of motivation to go out and run a 10 mile race -- and
even more to finish it.  So now you know why I'm so persistant at times....

<Um, did I answer the question?>

Heh...
I was never in terribly good shape, and moved in the middle of second grade,
becomeing the youngest in a class of 2nd through 6th grades...
Jr. High PE was unpleasant, to be kind. I always did fairly well, but
the actual sports were more of a social thing, which circles I did not
run in, and I wasn't truly pro-sports until high school.
Then, I went to community high, which has no sports, really. Played soccer
every day for an hour at lunch, informally, and was pretty good, but
informal.
(oh, in elementary school I played soccer with the rec dept. for a couple
of years, and we never lost a game...my strongest memory is of getting
hit in the face with te ball about every other game... :)

        Lesse...I tried out for baseball at Huron, sort of, but while the 
team was civil, I had a bunch of nagging injuries and felt a little lost,
besides, not having done organized sports. 
        So, through school, I always had an aptitude, never the social 
standing in the right groups, and wasn't in too good of shape.
        Then I bicycled a million miles, discovered I was really really fast,
and can play up to what I consider "my level". Fun fun fun.
        I sport at any opportunity, these days. 
        I think I might have in high school, if Community had had teams (so
I'd known the players and coaches, and not had to make a long bus ride).
        Oh, and I'm only 5'7", which tends to screw you in basketball, among
others... :)

I didn't like sports while I was growing up, learned to hate them through
junior high school gym classes, and haven't done anything athletic since,
including going to football games in college.

I never did anything worthwhile sportswise until I got out of high school.
I wasn't any good at any of the normal sports (and still don't know the rules
for most games - or really care, for that matter). After high school I got
involved in whitewater kayaking and paddled slalom fairly competetively for
a number of years (made it into the top 25% nationally). I also started 
playing soccer as an adult and have been doing that off and on for the last
10 years. I am now coaching a girl's under 11 soccer team and administering
a girl's under 9 league. My attitude is still pretty bad toward the more
traditional sports (although I now occasionally enjoy watching football on
TV).

I always seem to live next door to U-M basketball players. Weird.

I play Hockey and Skydive.
One for physical reasons, The other for pure intellectual excitment.
Anyone who thinks Skydiving is not an intellectual adventure should
experiance the types of new concepts your mind will dig up while
while racing toward the ground at 150 fps.  :)

"Geez, I can't believe how ****ing stupid I am" ?

(should have been a :) with that...)

By request, this item has been linked from ing 11 to agora 235.

This response has been erased.

 I was forced into becoming physically fit at a young age in order to escape
the clutches of 7 year old New Zealand girls who wanted to play 'catch &
kiss' with a studly 7 year old Yank...

I would like to personally thank all of you who went thru the illustrious
Ann Arbor Public School System.  I see all of you had mch the same time
and experience that I did:  bad.  Know I am sure it wasn't really 'just me'
as I was then told.  (I graduated in '79)
BTW: I went to Carpenter--->Scarlett--->Huron--->Clemente.
If I have only one purpose in life, it is to see that my children *DO NOT*
go thru the AA schools, but if they must, their experience must be a damn
sight better than my own.

 I guess AA Achools didn't teach the notion of personal responsibility or
accountability, either.

    I grew up hating sports and phys ed. classes, also.  I don't
remember my phys. ed. classes being quite as bad as those described here,
but they were still pretty awful.  At least the Ann Arbor school systems
value something besides sports  -- Portland, MI does not.

    I remember hating gym class.  I was very relieved when we were
told that we had a choice of 2 years of gym or 4 years of band
in high school.  I did the band, gladly.  

    Like most small (I was, then) people, I was not terribly great
at team sports.  I did try the basketball team in junior high, and was
the last-string player.  I got to play once all season.  I also
tried wrestling for a year when I was in high school, and actually
got my letter by a fluke -- of the four competition matches I got
to wrestle, the opposing team forfeited two of them.  I never
actually won a match against another school.  (The only reason
I wrestled was because all my friends at the time also wrestled.
We also formed a chess club. )

    One of the things that has always bothered me about school
sports are the social aspects -- the activities are usually
team activities, so there is always a lot of in-group/ 
popularity crap going on, as well as the pressure to win
rather than play and have fun.  While I was growing up,
my parents made sure I learned how to swim (lessons),
and let me learn how to ski.  I still enjoy doing both.

    My father never had any interest in team sports, so a lot of
his attitudes rubbed off on me.  I can't name all the prominent
teams in any sport, and barely know who makes the playoffs in
spite of reading newspapers regularly. ( I did develop a taste
for soccer when I was an exchange student, but I think that's
just a symptom of rabid Europhilia. :) )

This response has been erased.

Interesting.  I never grew to love gym, but I never had some of the
worst experiences described here.  I was generally the weakest and least
coordinated kid, so I never did very well on most things.  They kept
telling me I ought to be a really good runner, but it never seemed to
help - I was always one of the slowest ones around the track.  I never
managed to do chin-ups either.  I never much liked baseball -- since I
couldn't run, catch, hit, or throw, I was always relegated to outfield
and terminal boredome.  Fortunately, the teachers weren't the sadists
described here - when they introduced grading, the fact I was (almost)
always willing to make an effort ensured I never flunked.  I remember
the rules took a bit of doing to learn, but I don't recall finding them
all that impossible.  I don't remember any sort of formal effort, so I
presume I was just good enough at acquiring them to scrape by.  Despite
my lack of coordination, I actually did manage to occasionally do
half-way decently (ie, not the last to be selected) in a few sports.
Curiously, I think football was one of them -- I can't quite imagine why
today, since I've basically always been the proverbial 90 lb weakling.
Perhaps because it was one of the few I actually did manage to practice
outside of school for a bit.  I also managed to do reasonably well at
soccer, although again, I can't imagine why.  I don't think I actually
became really good at wrestling, but I found it one of the more
fascinating sports -- perhaps because it seemed to involve a surprising
amount of strategy and surprise.  Perhaps also because it involved a
fair amount of leverage and 3-d thinking, so was a place where I could
apply a lot of mechanical aptitude.  I think I probably did best at
volleyball -- I managed to became half-way decent at hitting the ball &
become a real expert at serving.  Unfortunately, I never got tall enough
(or a good enough jumper) to learn how to spike the ball.  But knowing
how to serve into the holes in the other side's team was good enough.
The sport I grew to hate with the most passion was dodge ball.  It
seemed to bring out the worst in the other kids.  I eventually figured
out how to cheat though -- the trick was to get hit early in the game
before the other side got really vicious.

I'm not very athletic, haven't been for many years.  Still, I'm happy to
remember the two years when I was one of the best in little league.  After
those two years, everyone seemed to get much better at the game than I was.
My brother for instance became the best catcher I've ever seen play the
game, though he now suffers knee problems.

I also like to remember how terrible I was at all the games I played at
this one private school until they got around to soccer.  I had been in
a private prep school for four years before that, so I had played more
soccer than anyone.  Amazing how fun it is to rule the field after being
a total loser.

No sports in high school, just gym, and I skipped gym the last two years.
By that time I was fencing.

Yes, his brother is Lenny Webster, sometimes major-league backup catcher...
(well, probably not, but what the hell)

What *I* remember from HS days was the gym requirement.  In my day, if I
remember correctly, they required *four years* of gym class.  They only
required 1 year of science and 2 of math.  Weird.  I distinctly remember
taking the "lifetime" sports class, where we learned tennis, golf, archery,
badminton, and...believe it or not....chess.

Huron now requires only one year of "gym" -- 1 semester of "Personal
Fitness", which is a general gym type of class, and 1 semester of
another phys. ed. class.  The first semester is required for everyone;
the second semester can be waived for people who play a sport, do
cheerleading, or are in marching band.

        Didn't *anyone* here excel at anything?
        Geez, no wonder we all wound up a bunch of computer geeks!

The system I went through, Mt. Pleasant Public Schools, only requires one
semester of gym in your four years in H.S.. Which I find as quite odd
considering the big emphasis on sports up there.

I went to Community high...I dunno if I was required to take any phys ed.
I took a couple of years of weight training, that's all we had besides dance.

I did excel at little league.  I made the all star team two years in a row.

I was also a very good fencer.

Well, "excel" is a tricky term.  I always enjoyed and played basketball.
I was never on school teams, but I organized and played on recreation
and intramural teams.

I am now an avid bicyclist, and do well enough to ride with the fast
club riders most of the time.

Hey, me too. Except for those couple of psycho riders who like to go
a million miles an hour :)

I usually did pretty well in gym or sports in general in school.  When we
played class games in elementary school, I was the first girl picked for
a team, usually even before most of the boys.  (Course since I had grown up
with most of the boys (no girls my age in my neighborhood) I was a tom-boy and
considered just one of the guys, not a -horror of horrors- a girl.  I was the
only girl that didn't have trouble getting a partner for dance class.)  I could
hit a mean baseball and didn't pitch too bad, either.  I held my own shooting
hoops and wasn't afraid of playing tackle football, though Daddy did restrict
football to touch football because we didn't have pads.

In high school we took 2 years of gym.  Most of the time I did well.  I did
very well in swimming (Dad still insists that I am half fish), fencing,
baseball, basketball and such.  I didn't like field hockey and still can't
get the hang of/or enjoy golf.  I was unfairly flunked 2 different marking
periods during those 2 years.  Once I couldn't participate because I had
pulled all the muscles and ligaments in my shoulder while skiing and once when
I had mononucleosus.  That teacher felt that since I was well enough to attend
school, I was well enough to participate in class, even though the mono left
me without enough energy to walk between classes let alone strenuous physical
exercise.  (Actually I think that she gave me an incomplete, but since it was
my senior year I didn't have time to make it up.)

   I'm a good swimmer (swam on an intramural team in college),
and was once a pretty good downhill skiier.  Not quite racing
caliber, but good enough to go down the black diamond slopes
with grace.

   I did a lot more sports in college, and enjoyed it a lot
more.  I did crew (for an intramural crew team), gymnastics
and fencing (for fun), and kept up swimming and skiing.  I
really loved crew -- there is something exhilarating about
the way the boat moves when everyone is perfectly in sync.,
it just flies.  Also, we were not terribly serious about it,
which made it a lot more fun (for some of the races, we took
beer along in the boat, which added weight and made it harder
to win.  We never won very often, anyway.)

   My main objection to high school sports was how seriously
everyone took it.  When I played on the middle school basketball
team, the team almost made it to the championship.  The coach
broke down and cried when we lost our final game.  I just am
not comfortable taking something basicially frivolous that
seriously.  Unfortunately, most of the community did not see
sports as I do.

Back when I was at Huron ('81), gym was a 4 year requirement -- but
one wasn't graded on ability but effort.  I opted for team sports,
and really did like it.  Was a little bit of a problem when I had
gym first hour during the track season, and following a 6am work-out
had gym class at 7:40.  The instructor (yes, the Axe Murderer, literally)
stated that running track was my perogative and that just because I had
just finished a 4-5 mile run and would do another 6-10 miles after school
didn't mean I should get out of running yet another mile at the beginning
of class -- as a track person I should be able to handle it.  Actually,
I think he may have been right.

I never did get much of my exercise from gym classes.  Elementary school
PE was actually fun, thanks to the excellent PE teacher the North Muskegon
elementary schools had, and junior high PE wasn't bad either.  High school
PE wasn't miserable, but it wasn't really enjoyable, probably because I had
just changed to a new school, didn't know anyone, and the format was 
different than what I was used to (no longer coed, more calisthenics, less
interesting activities, blah blah blah..)

Most of my exercise was outside of school.  In the summers there was about
a 90% chance on any given day that I'd be doing something in one of the
lakes (swimming, boating, waterskiing, sailing, body surfing, fishing,
brief flirtations with windsurfing, etc..)  In the spring and fall, things
had to fit around school and the water quickly got too cold so I'd do
something with friends that was usually fairly active but not competitive.
Soccer was about the only exception to this.  I played in the YMCA soccer
leagues until I got too old for the oldest one in our area and then stuck
around as an assistant coach for a while.  Winter was the time for skiing,
sledding, skating or walking out on the frozen lakes, snowball fights, etc..

Anyone paying attention may have noticed a pattern:  no organized and
competitive individual or team sports (except for the soccer..) and 
nearly everything (again, except the soccer) was something you could do
on your own or with very few people.  I still don't care much for team
games and/or sports:  I don't even like to be on a team in games like
Trivial Pursuit.  

This response has been erased.

A friend of mine had a gym teacher who would not give a female student
a mark higher than "B."  I wonder if he spoke of "effort."

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss