What are your worst PE memories?

[OneUmberJoker]

Breaking my arm playing football

Jumping over benches in tight PE knickers. Samantha Green setting fire to my hair!

Getting yelled at for not catching the ball in junior school.

Freezing cold showers in secondary school.

They wondered why we didn’t enjoy it!

Cross country running, before we got brave enough to skip it.

Doing gymnastics in a bralette and knickers because I’d forgotten my leotard and wasn’t allowed to wear anything from the lost property 🙄 I was 13.

Not getting chosen to dance with any boys
at country dancing.

getting really sweaty after actually semi enjoying a PE class but I couldn’t stop sweating. I just kept sweating through my uniform For the rest of the day. So I didn’t try my best after that, so I wouldn’t feel clatty

Period registers, run through showers with one teacher stood at each end to watch you, male pe teachers accidentally walking in the changing rooms mid girls changing, gym knickers, being forced out mid change if you weren't quick enough. Thankfully it's mostly different now

God, all of it. I’m so angry about the shit we were put through by successive sociopathic sports teachers.

I think the one that still rankles most is the teacher who took a violent dislike to me for first and second year of secondary (I left the school after that). She was a spiteful, strident woman who had a voice like a honking parrot and looked like a length of biltong in a netball skirt. She had serious physical boundary issues and would single people out for ridicule by the rest of the class. Her little cabal of sporty princesses were allowed to victimise the girls she didn’t like, as blatantly and unkindly as they liked. Eventually she decreed that my best friend and I would spend every PE and games lesson running the perimeter of the sports field, in opposite directions so we couldn’t support each other. We used to high-five when we crossed paths, and she’d scream like a fucking foghorn every single time. I often wonder what drives a person to be so devotedly, relentlessly unpleasant.

A very similar creature at my son’s school told him to “try being a bit less weird” - this was during a meeting between us, her, the headteacher and the senco to discuss the school’s failure to do anything about him being regularly beaten up in the changing rooms (for being autistic). They are a breed apart.

We only ever did it in the rain. Never when the weather was dry

The enforced communal showers. This was the late 1980s and I think the practice had already died out in many schools but our sadistic PE teacher still made us do it, at least for the first couple of years I was at secondary school. I participated in PE lessons as minimally as possible so certainly didn't need to get naked and run through a tepid shower with 30 other girls.

The thing I find odd is that our PE teachers never actually taught us anything. They'd hand us a racquet or a hockey stick and expect us to get on with it, despite most of us not really knowing the rules of the games.

Being forced to do exercises while having a heavy period. Being screamed at for not liking netball and being shit at it.

Always picked last when the popular sporty girls were allocated team-picking ☹️

Early 2000’s. Our class was too busy chatting so as punishment were made to sit on the grass of the playing field for the hours lesson in full sun on a very hot day. Obviously no shade, hats, drinks, sunscreen etc

Absolutely! How the hell were we going to know how to vault over a wooden horse?

My dad had this punishment….in a military prison in Cyprus in the 1950s. He was ill for weeks. Admittedly he was left for a lot longer than an hour, but to do this to schoolchildren is unconscionable.

There is a serious problem with school sports teachers.

I used to play hockey in goal, we got to wear full leg padders and kickers. Walking down the muddy field, I fell forwards and got stuck face first in mud, couldn't get up as I couldn't bend my legs.

Doing PE in gym knickers and realising sanitary towel was hanging out.

Breaking my ankle playing hockey and being carried back to school by the PE teachers.

Standing outside the changing rooms as excused from PE due to my broken ankle and still getting the detention then rest of the class received for changing too noisily.

This. It’s was absolutely mortifying. At the age of 15 there were all shapes and sizes and even pregnant girls in my school year all made to strip naked in front of each other and the teachers - imagine that happening now?! Just awful and I was picked on anyway this made it twenty times worse.

i was born in 1977 and the practice certainly went on in my school until I left in 1994.

Constantly being compared to my very sporty younger sibling..."your sibling is a joy to teach, you're just an uncoordinated lump"...was one of many delightful comments from my games teacher.

I broke my nose in the first PE lesson at secondary, we had to throw the netball up and catch eyes shut.

The showers. We had to walk out naked and the two teachers would check if we were wet or not. They were a lesbian couple and I was in an all girls school. I’m not insinuating anything against them but it was a fucking odd set up (convent)..

@NarwhalBuddy

Not getting chosen to dance with any boys at country dancing.

This, and country dancing in general. Twice a week for six weeks, every bloody year and I still don't know a Dashing White Sergeant from a Gay Gordon. 😁

Agree about the enforced showers. Degrading & utterly unacceptable, thank goodness it no longer happens.
The day after I'd started my periods we had to join up with the boys for 'team games'. Girls had to stand with legs apart & the boys had to crawl between the girls legs. It was awful & just writing it here has made me really angry that we had to do this.
Being aged 12 & having no choice was really horrible.

Getting player of the match in A hockey game (vs another school)... and realising after that, it wouldn't matter how good I was, I was never going to be popular enough to be fully accepted on the team.

I remember literally doing an Indian Rain Dance with a friend to try and get out of cross country 😞

Showering naked while the PE teacher watched.

Another one about the bloody showers in the early 80's.

Made to undress in the changing room. Towels had to be left on pegs in changing room. Told to queue up naked in pairs in another room and told off for attempting to cover yourself with your hands ( you don't have anything we haven't all seen before). Then into the ( freezing cold ) showers to share a cubical with another girl before walking out the other end into the changing room to get dressed.

How there hadn't been a mass court case against child abuse by PE teachers I don't know.