What are your worst PE memories?

[OneUmberJoker]

Breaking my arm playing football

Having to play hockey on freezing cold days, in just tiny little games skirts and short socks.
And ditto to those showers - useless things you just had to run through with a pervey PE teacher watching,

No wonder the very word ‘gym’ still gives me the shudders….

I hated everything about it (with the possible exception of swimming).

I was terrible at sport and not allowed to wear my glasses for PE so I couldn’t see properly.

i got hit a few times by a hockey ball that I didn’t see coming, and then I was terrified of it and tried to avoid any actual contact with the game. The teacher would yell at me for not trying, and I frequently got detentions for just standing about. I didn’t even understand the rules of the game because no one explained them.

Having to do gymnastics or dance in a skimpy leotard while having awful periods and wondering if my sanitary towel was showing.

Communal changing rooms.

Always being picked last for teams and the jeering that went with that.

The whole class getting detentions from the teacher of our next lesson, because we were late - she should have taken that up with the PE teacher who kept us out on the field till the bell went for the next lesson.

I was actually a good swimmer and for about 4 weeks of the summer term when we swam in the freezing outdoor pool the PE teacher had to give up her usual endless stream of yelling at me, because I could actually do something well. No thanks to her though - she never offered any instruction, just made us swim lengths.

Being utterly and completely useless at every single sport we did in PE. Doing cross country. Every moment was awful.

Christ where to start?

1. The showers, obviously. We had two female PE teachers, both absolutely vile. We all had to walk through the showers naked in a row while they watched. I was the only girl with pubes and the start of boobs. I was shy to the point of being almost mute at that age (undiagnosed autism), and hyper self conscious. I was so traumatised I actually considered suicide after my first week of high school.
2. Being tall and very skinny and light but absolutely useless at all sports. I was relentlessly picked on because I ‘should be fast’ due to my body shape. Cross country running in the snow and the teachers throwing snowballs at me because they didn’t believe I wasn’t trying (undiagnosed asthma), getting back to the changing rooms and coughing up blood.
3. Not being able to do cartwheels and everyone laughing at me trying. Just couldn’t do them.

If I could travel back in time I’d tell them to go and fuck themselves and just refuse to do any of it. It was utterly miserable.

Ohhh God - I’d forgotten the showers, @Tobleronearsecam - or I’d blanked out the memory! Maybe we need a support group.

I can’t believe so many people had the same awful experiences. I always thought it was just my school! What on earth was going through their minds to treat pubescent girls like that?

The lesbian teacher watching us all in the changing rooms and telling us to get our legs out 😬 oh, and the boys teacher towel whipping them all on the arses when in the shower after rugby. Filthy perverts.

Male teachers coming into the changing rooms to watch the naked girls in the shower.

Being expected to play sports in the freezing cold wearing a short PE skirt and polo shirt. Was prone to bronchial issues and I remember my mum going mad at the head of the lower school because girls weren't allowed tracksuits but the boys were. She got the rules changed. Mum power!!

And I'm another one who was always one of the last chosen for teams, I'm dyspraxic so was pretty useless at sports but dyspraxia wasn't a thing in those days.

The showers were a nightmare.

I absolutely hated PE. Can't recall being taught a damn thing, it's as if you were expected to just know how to play netball or hockey, or to climb a rope or hit a ball. Lazy teachers who played favourites and didn't tackle bullying.

From 3rd year at high school onwards I just refused to participate. Still hate any kind of competitive sport or team game. Hope schools are better now.

Communal showers, all girls school. PE Teacher would stare at us as we stood there under the shower. Apparently it was to ensure that we had done it “ properly “. But it wasn’t just a casual glance and blatantly obvious that she was doing it deliberately. Eventually we got shower cubicles but she would always be in the locker room when we got changed. She gave me the creeps and a big reason for doing my “A” levels at college. Makes me shiver to think about it.

being expected to just know how to play certain team sports without actually being coached or told the rules - no wonder we were no good and had no idea what we were doing
ditto being expected to just be able to do gymnastics/athletics without any coaching- if you’re fifteen and have never climbed a rope or done a cartwheel it’s actually probably not a good idea.
i used to have hideous heavy periods, i was never very aware and my mum never made sure I had things with me, I would leak terribly and we would do PE in gym knickers and t shirts. I genuinely hated it and myself and it scarred me for life I think. It never occurred to me to ask teachers for pads, I was so mortified.

All my PE memories are awful. I was incredibly bad at PE. But... thank goodness... We didn't have showers so I wasn't subjected to those.

Always being picked last.
Being totally incapable of jumping high enough to clear a hurdle
Being forced to run in the inter-house 800m race. We only had a small playing field so this was 4 x round the track. I was lapped.

Loved PE, apart from orienteering as it was always freezing and I didn’t have a PE jumper. I was lucky though, we spent a lot of time outside at home so I was fit and reasonably good at sports. I did get a lot of bitchiness for a couple of months after I beat the sporty Queen bee in the swimming gala. She was rich and swam competitively for a private swimming club, but I’d learnt to swim in the sea and rivers so was rapid.

The showers were awful, especially for the girls that were bigger and particularly hairy. There was a really shy girl in our year that struggled to speak to anyone, once the PE teacher yelled to the supervising TA across the sports court in front of the boys and male teacher that X had her period so didn’t need to shower. She didn’t come back to school for 2 months after that day.

Everything everyone else has said. I was born in 1960. The day I left my girls school I vowed that nobody would ever make me hot, throw or catch another ball, ever, or engage in any form of organised sporting activity.

Whilst I was useless at all sport, including team sports, it never held me back at work or from running functional teams at work.

You don't have to engage in organised sport to be active, fit and well.

Bullying related PE activity, encouraged by the PE teacher was disgraceful.

It was better for my children.

Like so many others, we had communal changing rooms and showers, and had to go in naked while the sadist teachers watched. One of my best friends had anorexia and I vividly remember how hard she tried to avoid PE, but usually had to do it anyway and suffer the snide comments about her body from the sporty girls. It was fucking awful.

We had a swimming pool at my school but it was outdoors and on the far side of the yard, so you had to scuttle across from the changing room in your swimming costume. Usually the boys were doing tennis while the girls did swimming and they'd down racquets to jeer at us while we ran. This was the mid-90s.

And yes, cross country running. We were made to go on a circuit round the town in our gym knickers and aertex blouses and there were always a bunch of pervert men who had apparently memorised the PE timetable and knew where to stwnd every week to get an eyeful of jiggling pubescent tits. Again, fucking awful.

I was surprised to find that picking teams still seems to take place. My autistic DD has been very upset on more than one occasion when they picked teams and she was left until last, listening to the others in the team telling each other not to pick her. I am a primary school teacher and always organise the trams myself in PE lessons. It has the advantage of being much quicker as well as not making kids feel bad about themselves. The trouble is that secondary school PE teachers were probably good at PE at school md weren't ever picked last. I had to email nd ask them if they could use a more inclusive approach to organising teams.

Yes, I was deeply unpopular at school (and also autistic) and was always picked last for teams. Last of all, and with some sighing and eye-rolling by the 'picker' who was forced to end up with me.

The irony was that I wasn't actually bad at sports - I was even pretty good at some of them. Definitely better than average. But it was more important to let me know where I stood in the pecking order, so that I wouldn't get above myself.

These days I can recognise that it was bullying, and that the PE teacher was absolutely complicit in it.

So much of this was exactly my experience in the late 80's/early 90's and it really impacted on my enjoyment of secondary school, which overall I have neutral feelings about at best, despite leaving with the best grades in the year. The same PE teachers were still there 10 years later when a younger relative went to the same school, and she had a very different experience, so times did change.

YES. School PE put me off sport for ages. In my mid 20s I tentatively took up running and was shocked to find I absolutely loved it after hating it at school. I'm also really good at it. But school PE was so humiliating, abusive (yes, abusive and this thread confirms it) and unpleasant that everyone I knew swore they'd never do any kind of sport ever again when we were at school.

Getting hit in the stomach by a volleyball that had been hit with full force wasn’t great.

In P7 we were doing a thing that involved leapfrogging another child. I’ve never been able to leapfrog so I told the teacher and she said I could just jump around the side of the other child. I did that when it was my turn and the teacher snarkily said “that was a strange leapfrog”. It really upset me that she had forgotten what she’d told me.

I couldn't jump, leap 2 footed, hop, cartwheel or tumble. I struggled with coordination. I wasn't fast at running.
The one thing I could do was play football ⚽️. What I lacked in speed, i made up for in skill. I wasn't allowed to play at school and was ridiculed by teachers. I played in the park with the local lads. I could ride a bike, spent hours out playing on it. I could have been sporty, if I'd actually been shown.

I'm nearing 60, I now play sports. If I'd been taught and encouraged I could have been good, rather than middling as a mid life starter.

Showers, cross country, and having to play hockey in the freezing cold wearing a tiny gym skirt.

Same here. I did no exercise at all in my 20s, but in my 30's I found I actually enjoyed it and joined a gym, learned to ski and play golf, started playing tennis and squash, bought a bike and started rambling and became a regular swimmer. The common factor is absolute hatred of team sports as my teenage years at comp traumatised me especially with the bullying that completely ruined any kind of "team" activity for me, whether sports or work related. None of the exercise and "sport" I enjoy are "team" sports - all either solo or done in pairs. All this crap about "games" being good for team building etc is utter rubbish if you're no good at competitive team sports - it just makes things worse and makes you less likely to become a team player when you're constantly chosen last, bullied, and ignored on the sports pitch. Schools should allow kids to "opt out" of team sports and do things like gym instead if they're no good at sports.

Agree with being expected to somehow know the rules of netball, volleyball etc. I remember getting the piss ripped out of me for not knowing that netball was exclusively a girls' sport,I thought it was the same as basketball.

Also, getting yelled at for never being able to hit the board in the right place for long jump etc. I'd aim to take off just behind to be on the safe side but apparently that's not allowed either. I could never understand why they didn't just measure from the board anyway, it's not as though I was cheating.