What are your worst PE memories?

[OneUmberJoker]

Breaking my arm playing football

Also PE means physical education and not once were we ever educated in that area. No being made aware of how important it was for your future health to stretch, get core strength, not sit for long periods, no actual teaching of anything. Just forced hockey on muddy fields in freezing weather or netball (I hated both with a passion). I had two PE teachers, one was a witch and one was an angel. Everyone in the entire school hated the witch and I would guarantee 50 odd year’s later not one person would forget who she was even today.

Primary school - playing a stupid game where you had to run from one side of thd hall to the other while the opposing team threw balls at you. I tripped over a ball, hit my head on the wall, broke my glasses and needed 3 stitches.

Secondary- my period always arrived first thing on a Thursday. First lesson was PE so I was trying to do gymnastics in little shorts wearing a massive sanitary towel feeling absolutely rotten.

Having your legs slapped if you didn’t climb the rope quick enough.

Rope burns on legs from the ropes.

Always the exceptions, but there's something generally about PE teachers which is severely crass and insensitive.

I was around 13 or 14. standing outside waiting for my group's turn to run the 400m and my nose started bleeding. I was prone to them anyway so I asked if I might go inside to get some tissues and sort myself out. My PE teacher for some reason lost her marbles at this and started saying "This is a PE lesson, we're outside, you can't just go in!" I pointed out that there was blood exiting my nostril and was met with "Does that affect your legs? No. Then you can run can't you"

Ended up running the 400m with blood streaming down both nostrils, and a ruined PE kit. My Mum was not happy. Neither was the Head of PE when he found out.

So many of these experiences are familiar to me from Grammar School in the 70s. Being picked last because I was tall, gawky and uncoordinated. Being shouted at and regularly humiliated for not being sporty enough. The enforced (tepid) communal showers, the games mistress “joking” loudly that she didn’t know why CatAsleep bothered to shower, “I mean, it’s not as if she exactly exerts herself, is it?” - cue jeers and laughter from the sycophants.

The games mistress was a foul creature and I genuinely hated her at the time. Her name crops up occasionally on my school Facebook page, and you can almost feel the collective shudder of horror from pretty much everyone who encountered her.

Being picked near to last because I wasn't part of the "in" crowd, even though I was pretty good at most sports.

Orienteering, which I never fully understood.

Being so excited when I started secondary school as they had a dance studio and we would be doing dance lessons. It was not dance by any stretch of the imagination.

A fire drill during a swimming lessons which meant we had to grab towels and shoes and walk across the muddy field, dripping wet in just a swimming costume and towel.

A PE teacher who decided my name was Danielle as my brother is called Daniel and was in her form group. My name isn't Danielle.

Having the boys PE teachers for years 10 and 11 who decided we probably didn't know how to play anything so made us learn the basics. We spent the best part of 6 weeks whacking the tennis balls out of court and then spending the lesson looking for them in the bushes.

Yes to communal showers fully naked having to prove you had showered and being watched by the teachers. I would then be shouted at by the teacher in the next lesson for arriving to their lesson in an unacceptable state (meaning with wet hair or a red face, neither were acceptable despite having just been made to exercise and made to shower).

Yes to not actually being taught anything about PE just expected to know the rules of everything and play sports.

Being made to do hurdles, falling over and breaking my ankle and being made to do them again with the broken ankle (and then complete the rest of my school day and walk home with before anyone believed me).

Being put in hockey goal with no protective gear as a punishment.

Waiting to be picked for the team. For some reason, our high school PE teachers used to give that task to 2 of the most popular girls in the class - who would then pick the girls for their team in order of social importance. A great way pf keeping you firmly in your place.

Cross country running and hockey in midwinter in the snow and sleet, indoor games and swimming in the summer.

Shower cubicles that weren't lockable or fully private.

Communal changing rooms.

So many things really. I have a lifelong aversion to group sports and competitive sports as a result.

Yes it's bizarre isnt it? I remember playing hockey but we werent actually playing it because none of us knew the rules and they didnt tell us, we just used to run about swinging hockey sticks in the air and tried to dodge one particularly violent bully who made it her mission to hit all of us with it. The PE teacher used to just sit on the side in her huge winter coat whilst all of us had to wears shorts and ignore us!

The boys PE teacher was a sadist - we had a freezing cold swimming pool and he made the boys line up at the side of the pool. He would walk behind them with a large flip-flop, and any little boy who was slightly hesitant about jumping in got a hefty whack on the buttock/thigh with the flip flop. I can remember the sore red marks it left. A horrible cruel man who shouldn’t have been anywhere near children.

I have 3.

1. Always being the last to be chosen for teams. I have autism (which was undiagnosed back then) and coordination problems.

2. Having to walk through the shower with my towel held above my head while the teacher stood watching. 😧

3. Having my thumb broken from being wacked with a hockey stick. The teacher didn't believe me despite my thumb being 3 times it's normal size.

This was in the early 1990's.

You write so well! I hope you're an author.

@sprigatito

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

Ditto here. We had a succession of utterly vile "teachers" who should never have been let near children. No wonder so many people hate sport/exercise.

One year we had a chemistry teacher doing the games lessons. Fair enough I suffered the games lessons as I was overweight, two left feet and no hand/eye co-ordination, but the awful woman treated me like an idiot during Chemistry lessons too, which I was actually good at. Apparently she must have thought that because I was crap at sport and she could bully me on the playing field, the same applied to "proper" lessons too!

I hope there's a special place in hell for the vile games/PE teachers.

1. Like PP, the horrific forced showers whilst teachers watched- what kind of sickos were teachers back then? if they did that nowadays they'd be on a register. One of our PE teachers actually requested cameras to be put in the showers.
2. Pleading not to do PE when I had very heavy periods and having to constantly check I wasnt bleeding through my shorts whilst feeling constantly like I was going to faint
3. Like others, we were never taught a single thing about fitness or health whatsoever, we just had to do endless tedious hockey/netball matches in the freezing cold whilst our limbs turned blue and the teacher who was dressed in a duvet kept shouting at us to stop complaining.

We had a brilliant sports teacher whose passion was athletics and she taught us all how to throw a javelin, long jump, hurdle etc. I was quite crap at sport (too fat) but my technique was impeccable!

Worst memory was being in goal (obviously) for hockey on a freezing winter's day and getting whacked really hard by the ball on the bare thigh (why no pads? I wonder). By the end of the match people were gathered round to "admire" the almost instant bruise. It was magnificent! That was also the day I started my first period which I only discovered when I went to put my knickers back on after showering 😟. Not my finest hour!

Being taught PE by a failed Olympian who was bitter as hell about it and had the opinion that if you weren't as good as they were then you were not trying hard enough/were lazy. Then you would be called out infront of the entire class to 'demonstrate' which in reality was just said failed Olympian pointing out all your failings. Another one of their tactics was to deliberately partner you with the best/fastest in the year and then openly label you as a failure when surprise surprise you were not as good as them. In the school I went to popularity was very closely linked to PE. I was about as unpopular as it got.

Guess what XXXXXX (keeping this anonymous here deliberately). I received a dx of dyspraxia as an adult. Because despite what you might think, some people genuinely cant. You were an absolute bitch then.

I never understood netball. Apparently there were 'rules' that everyone else must have been given at birth because we certainly weren't taught them and I just used to run about a lot and get shouted at because I wasn't in the right place? Ditto with rounders - there were rules I just didn't get and nobody would explain them to me, they'd just yell at me for running or not running or standing still - no idea what that was all about.

Subsequently diagnosed ADHD which might go some way towards explaining it, but honestly, would it be too much trouble to just tell us the fucking rules? We didn't all emerge from the womb fluent in 'ball games'.

Forgot my pumps one day. The PE teacher looked in the spares box and made me wear a pair not only gross but way too big and made me run in the relay. I couldn’t get up a speed and of course my team lost, was mocked for weeks.

Same here.

Also the naked showers. Horrendous for girls going through puberty.

Teacher didn’t believe I’d showered in the communal shared shower so made me do it alone again in front of everyone. I was sobbing
at the time I didn’t realise how terrible that was! 1996, so hardly that long ago

Showering naked after every PE/games lesson! We weren't even allowed to wear swimsuits or a bikini which other schools did allow under the sports/games kits rather than underwear!

Worse was that we had a "pavilion" in the middle of the games fields which included the changing rooms. There was a glass window between the boys and girl's showers at the back of the respective changing rooms which was made up of many small panes of glass. Regularly (at least once every other lesson), one pane (or sometimes more) would be broken and the boys would crowd around it looking at the girls in the showers - we had to take it in turns for someone to stand in front of the broken window to stop them peering in (of course the person who had to stand there had to be naked as it was within the shower area so the boys had a good view of a naked back and buttocks and then the last person to stand there had to make a run for it, starkers, backs to the changing area, usually being cheered on by the boys looking through the window. Teachers (in both boys and girls rooms) knew but didn't do anything about it - the pyscopaths probably through it was "character building! Obviously the boys kept deliberately breaking a pane of glass to get their cheap thrills!

All of it. I was a larger girl, my dad was physically disabled by the time I was 3, my older siblings all had medical issues which meant they didn't 'play sport' my dad wasn't into football or rugby.
Hated gymnastics and the assumption I 'knew' how to do a forward roll (broke my shoulder when the PE teacher decided to push me over)
Athletics, hilarious lessons when the stupid teacher couldn't work out how a left hander was supposed to throw it, ditto discus etc
Hockey, boys hacking the ground from under my feet.
Massive arguments when my ds was at school (he similarly hated school PE but loved cycling etc) when the complete dick of a PE teacher pushed him over on the rugby field because ds preferred to not make contact at all with anyone, then proceeded to stamp on his knee. The A&E consultant wasn't happy either !
By secondary DS had developed a way of avoiding PE completely and offered to walk the headmasters dog instead!!!

Getting hit by a hockey ball on the shins aimed up the field by one of my classmates who was on the opposing team. She went on to compete in the Olympics.