What are your worst PE memories?

[OneUmberJoker]

Breaking my arm playing football

Same.

i was just thinking this. I did middle school in the NE early 90s then moved to the SE from year 9 in a secondary and all of my horrific PE memories belong to that middle shool era - naked showers while the games mistress eyeballed us, the relentless being picked last for team games, the games mistress taking the (genuine) note from my mum about why I couldn’t do PE that day and shouting about how being asthmatic isn’t an excuse because do you know how many Olympians are asthmatic??(id just been hospitalised with asthma and was on steroids for it). Absolute psychos

Two words: Bleep. Test 🤮

I hated and feared PE.

Swimming lessons where the teacher just stood at the side of the pool and shouted at us rather than actually explain anything.
Netball where the 'popular girls' would just lob the ball right at you as hard as possible.
Hockey where the 'popular girls' would deliberately hit you in the shins or ankle with the hockey stick or trip you up.
Having to do cross-country in the winter, through the housing estate and the park (where there was a flasher)
Falling over when doing hurdles, cutting my knee open, and being made to carry on running.
Everything about the showers - we did have separate cubicles but the teachers weren't adverse to twitching the curtain aside to make sure we were showering.

Teachers letting the kids pick the team so those of us who were not in the 'cool kid set' were left until last and debated over as though we were some sort of fly-tipped rubbish that nobody wanted.

Another vote for the dreadful communal showers😬

Sports day, aged 11. Being required to take part in an event, when I was rubbish at all sport.

My parents regarded sport as pointless for a girl and certainly wouldn't have wasted any money on it. I had no coaching and ended up swimming 50m against 5 other girls who had all been taught proper swimming since they were toddlers. I'd been in a pool about 10 times in my life.
I gave up sport the day I left school, dumped my trainers in a bin and didn't go near sport again until I was 48.

Don't you just love school sport. Designed to destroy confidence and exclude people. 🙄

Boys laughing at literally anything I did, shouting fatty boom boom or such like when I ran. Destroyed what little self esteem I had and likely contributed to weight gain and my lifelong hatred of exercise.

Getting changed as quickly as possible because the male PE teacher would come in and "supervise" us.

Never being sure if your stuff would still be there when you went to get changed because everything got nicked - money, shoes, clothes, phones.

Seeing a boy's ankle be broken by a slide tackle in football and him being told to walk it off. Traumatic to watch must have been worse for him.

This was 2000-2005. Fucking awful.

All secondary school. I was not sporty at all but I don't recall ever being taught anything or helped to improve. You were just expected to know and sent out to get on with it then yelled at for failing. Memories include having to go in goal in hockey with no leg guards and then having the ball whacked into my ankle by the boys' PE teacher. Ended up at A and E. Getting reported to my form teacher for refusing to header a basketball (I was prone to headaches and really scared of hurting myself). Cross country. Sports day tryouts - I never qualified for anything so avoided the humiliation of a bigger audience. The popular kids getting to choose teams and not wanting me on theirs. It goes on. I hated every minute of PE and it put me off sport or exercise for years. I loved it when my kit got nicked and my mum refused to replace it. The standoff lasted around half a term and I was "punished" by having to sit in the hall instead of doing the lesson 🙄 The boy I fancied at the time didn't do PE due to a health condition so he was in the hall too - winner winner 🤣

Being constantly cold all winter. Standing shivering in a field whilst wearing an awful wrap around skirt and gym knickers in zero temperatures.

Football. I went to a mixed sex school where we had to play mixed football. I'd never played before year 7, so what was the point of us beginners being in teams with the boys who played everyday. I 'd just stand there freezing, not being passed the ball ever, occasionally shouted at by the pe teacher to make more of an effort. It was a massive revelation when I saw professional players on TV training, doing drills, dribbles, practising goal scoring etc. It really wouldn't have been so difficult to organise this for us beginners, so we could actually touch the ball.
The other subjects didn't get away with just ignoring the lesser able students.

Beep test. Everyone would laugh at the first ones out, it was cruel.

Cross Country, with the pe teacher following up behind in the mini van to pick up the asthma sufferers. I was always near the back.

Being laughed at for running like an ostrich.

Being made to run around the field with a pulled muscle as the pe teacher didn't believe me. It was agony.

Horrible blue leotards for gym that showed everyone what stage of boob development you were at. I was very ashamed of my total flat chestedness.

No left handed hockey sticks, would it really have been so complicated for the school to aquire 1 or 2. I was allowed to hit the ball on the 'wrong' side of the stick, due to holding the stick the other way, but as it was curved I had no control of where the ball went. Impossible to score.

I hated pe. Thank goodness I was tall, slim and looked as though I could he sporty, so I was always picked in the middle. I used to feel sorry for the ones picked last.

The communal showers for me as well, being body consious and shy going through puberty. Being ginger haired as well, I had to shave to ensure no body hair.

My PE teacher, when I was learning to backflip, asked me how much I weighed. I was 14, and weighed a little over 7 stone so I told her and she raised one eyebrow, smirked, and said “I think not only are you telling porkie pies, you’ve been eating rather a lot of them too, haven’t you?”

1. PE teacher (male) smacking me on my bottom whenever I walked past him and him asking me to sit on his knee - 1993
2. Primary school unable to climb the knotted ropes
3. coming last in cross country
4. being bullied for my hairy legs
5. year 5 we had this old Victorian building as our school with a wall of shower heads - I was well developed and we had to walk under the shower heads naked all of us and the girls would laugh at how hairy I was

Taking part in every p.e lesson because it's in your time table. I was a good girl at school and did what I was told. I never had a note once to get out of p.e. I tried my best. I wasn't sporty. Still the p.e teachers would tut and roll eyes at me. At least I was taking part unlike most girls in my year.

In the '80s.
The showers.
Hockey in Navy knickers and an airtex top when it was -1 outside
The favouritism and the choosing of teams - I was never first, and I was never last, but my heart hurt for those who were.
Got slapped fully across the face by a teacher (I was larking about so almost fair enough in those days) but then her begging me not to tell anyone because she would lose her job. Me: "yeah, It's fine, I won't" The begging stayed with me a long time, a lot more than the slapping did.

Mixed sex swimming lessons - standing against the wall waiting my turn at the side of the pool in a wet swimsuit was pretty embarrassing. I hit puberty very early compared to all the other girls and all the boys were pointing and laughing at me because I was cold and my wee boobs did what boobs do when they are cold.

We had shower/period registers. Were you at my school?! No one else I've spoken to this about has ever heard of such a thing @EuroTour

I never understood why they always made us wear such little clothing in dead of winter; little shorts and t-shirt in the snow/rain. In my school they never gave is time to shower; they would keep you out on the field till the bell rang. So everyone just sprayed themselves with Impulse and stank all day which was embarrassing. Oh and whichever teacher we had next would give us detention for being late!

Trying to do Roly polys with massive sanitary towels on trying not to make them crinkle 😂

@dayslikethese1 but it was "character building" apparently. So we were actually told at the school I went to.

Which is utter bollocks of course..

Or possibly the teachers were perverts topsey one in particular I remember (male) would stare at the girls who were, shall we say 'well-developed', it was grim.

Doing gym/dance in a leotard as a teenager with mixed gender classes and a male teacher. Felt so self conscious all us girls did.
being made to wear hockey skirt with big knickers and the boys got to wear trackie bottoms. We were allowed to wear the skirt with trackie bottoms in year 11 only.
cross country- we would run through a housing estate to a load of muddy fields where it was so muddy you got stuck..pe teachers would stand on sidelines shouting
boys doing rugby and girls doing netball- no mixing no choice
im 38 and hated PE (was state school)

Don't you just love school sport. Designed to destroy confidence and exclude people. 🙄

This, it was awful. There has to be a better way. As an adult I've enjoyed swimming, yoga and some snail's pace running but at secondary school it was grim.
DD1 didn't mind PE because she is tall and has a typical runner's body shape. DD2 has hated school sports because she is short and does not love running. We've made a real effort as parents each week for years to support her with exercise she does enjoy and is good at - swimming and climbing - but PE does not help anyone's self esteem. So many teenage girls hate it and are put off sports for life.
Not sure what the answer is though. When DD1 was in year 7 they trialled separating pupils by ability. Friend had a child in the least able PE group and said that was the only time he actually enjoyed PE but I know DD2 would have been mortified to be in that group. Someone told me that at their school for year 10 and 11 they could choose from a variety of activities in the hope of establishing that it could be enjoyable. Any PE teachers on here with any good ideas on how to improve the experience? And I don't but the "it's character building" argument. Feeling humiliated is not character building.

Communal showers were hell, especially for early developers like me who had breasts and pubic hair aged ten. The stares and comments still haunt me

Simply BECAUSE I was so bad at PE and hated it so much, I actually have 2 good memories - of the only times I was successful at something PE-related.

When we were being introduced to discus-throwing, I was the only one in the class to be able to 'spin' the discus first time.
At the annual 6th form versus staff netball game I was put in as goal keeper, of course, nobody else wanted to do it. I managed to save a goal thrown by our over 6ft chemistry teacher.

Isn't it sad that in 7 years of PE lessons my successes were so very rare that I can remember both of them!

I forgot about the fact that while we were forced to wear skimpy, freezing cold clothes for PE, the female teacher would always be in a shell suit (it was the 90s) with warm layers on underneath. The male teacher was a shouty sadist as well, but he did at least always wear shorts so wasn't a total hypocrite.

Trying to negotiate PE with puberty and periods starting was probably seriously traumatic for a significant number of girls. I started mine when I was 12, during my first year at secondary school, and sanitary ware was limited to huge, mattress-like pads (Jo Brand called them fairy hammocks) and tampons, neither of which were anything like as absorbent and reliable as the ones you get now. The pads made a big tell-tale bulge in your pants and they often came adrift during exercise because the sticky backing wasn't very strong. I can remember constantly worrying about it when I was doing hockey or netball and surreptitiously trying to adjust myself - luckily (in this specific instance), I was also fat and unpopular so nobody ever passed the ball to me anyway.

Always found it funny that, in the depths of winter, usually doing cross country in the snow, the pe teacher checked we weren’t daring to wear a vest under our pe top, whilst they stood in their tracksuit, big coat, gloves and hat