What are your worst PE memories?

[OneUmberJoker]

Breaking my arm playing football

Cross country in mid winter and then the dreaded communal showers ! We used to try and get back quickly before the teachers got there and put water on our hair and a towel round us to pretend that we had already gone in the showers.
I do wonder if the ogling some teachers did was more to check for any bruises or signs of abuse ? Or just because they liked seeing us trying to get dressed as fast as possible ( as it was so cold )
I never caught a cold , so probably good for you all that icy cold running ! Lol

The showers. The sheer terror of hockey. Always being picked last. The screaming teacher. Just all of it. As a glasses-wearing, skinny, dyspraxic nerd who was relentlessly bullied throughout secondary by the popular sporty girls, the entire experience was genuinely traumatic and has put me off sport for life.

It’s also put me off sport as 70s PE was so awful and all I can remember vividly was the cold.
I was never picked until it was obvious I’d need to be on some team who didn’t want me and trampolining made me feel ill ( being tall didn’t help as I felt very far from the ground )
It was hell.

I was sporty but hated PE. In middle school we all had to climb the ropes to the ceiling and touch the metal bit at the top, my friend Nicholas fell off half way down and landed on his face. He got up dazed and started to cry, and he had broken one of his front teeth. I've never been able to forget it.
Another time the PE teacher got us to throw the shot put ball over our heads from front to back (I still don't understand the point of that), and one girl dropped it on her head. It sounded like a coconut hit with a hammer, and we all gasped and froze wondering if she was dead.

The horror stories just keep on coming...😢

I wonder how many women on MN recognise themselves in the PE teachers or the sporty girls who made other girls' lives miserable - it would be fascinating to get a glimpse into their twisted minds. I

I couldn’t throw, run or hit anything , so I spent a lot of time very miserable and told how useless I was.

I wonder that as well. Do they have any idea of the misery they caused? Do they have any regrets? In the case of the PE teachers I doubt it. They were such a distinct type. I think they must have been born with something vital missing.

My son wasn’t sporty , parents night it was always ‘ tries hard ‘ but he wouid have rather done art or even extra maths than PE!

Middle school PE in the 90s was horrendous and I was pretty good at sport.

The male PE teacher always walking in to the changing room when the girls were changing, much to the amusement of the female one.

Same male teacher making girls stand between his legs to teach them how to hold a cricket bat apparently.

Same teachers picking teams by race (white first, then other races) with the Asian overweight kid last and made to run laps on his own whilst the teachers literally stood there laughing.

Abusive twats. I hope they rot in hell.

PE teachers are a world apart. Or they were back then anyway. Sport isn’t as important as maths or English , but they were almost Demi gods at my old ( rough ) school! It was different times, but it shapes how you feel about fitness and it didn’t help !

I have many! Didn't realise how many till I read your op and thought back.

Getting in trouble for not dropping the rounders bat before I started running, getting in trouble for dropping the rounders bat before I started running...., a very gobby girl having a go at me for missing a goal in hockey (she had to do laps for the rest of the class though, so maybe not such a bad memory afterall mwahahaha), getting told off for vaulting a horse incorrectly (I was totally doing it correctly), international dance class, my knickers showing under my gymnastics pants things and someone laughing at me when I did a forwards roll. Oh I could go on for days here 😂😂.

PE was awful in my day and two out of three of my PE teachers were absolute psychopaths. Put me off exercise for many years!

I couldn't run, jump, throw or catch.

I was good at hitting things though and many years later got a black belt.

Anyone else remember this?

Exactly the same experiences and memories of forced participation in hated sports in gym shorts on freezing cold hockey pitches and courts .No showers we just went stinking back to class .And you Miss S .are the reason that i hate all forms of sport due to lack of confidence .Your ugly scathing look has remained imprinted on my mind forever .I hope you are proud of yourself.

Loved sports and still do though no impact sports for me now due to back issues. I did however find it a bit much running in an actual blizzard for an inter school cross country championship. The snow was so thick you couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of your face. This would have been in about 1980, imagine it would not be allowed to go ahead now. Getting hit in the mouth with a hockey ball, teeth were fine fortunately as no mouth guard used but very sore. Also knocked myself out on gym equipment . Also the injustice of girls not being allowed to play cricket at my school.

The showers didn’t bother me was raised by a Mother who was very much ‘all girls together’.

Watching my knees turn purple when we were forced to play netball in the snow, in tiny grey skirts and aertex blouses. The teacher was in a hooded duffel coat with a hot drink.
Having to go into the PE teachers’ room (where they just sat and smoked) to explain, in front of men, that you had your period and wanted to sit out, then have that questioned.
Verbally abused and humiliated if you didn’t have a hair bobbin.
Rounders was used as a form of psychological abuse. The sadist PE teacher changed the rules all the time and screamed at anyone who got them wrong. Drop the bat, hold the bat, go here, go there, whatever. I won’t play rounders ever again.
When the fat girl was made to demonstrate the horse. The teacher must have known she couldn’t possibly do it. Watching them try to humiliate girls that age is my overall stand out memory.
Mixed swimming lessons where the boys leered and jeered at our pubescent breasts and nothing was done to correct their behaviour. Shouting teacher and communal changing area. Such a damp mess afterwards as there was no time to change properly. I like swimming but didn’t get into a pool again after school until I was 25.
Also, only the girls on the hockey team got an A in PE no matter how hard anyone tried.
Special place in hell for those teachers who shamed 13 year olds for having periods.

A school camp aged 13 involving lots of sports. I got my period the day before going, so had a crash course in using tampons.

Most of the trip was in bunks, but 1 night was camping in the woods. We had to canoe across a lake. Trying to pull the boat ashore I fell head to toe in the mud. No spare clothes allowed, just PJ's wrapped in our sleeping bags. At night, they took us on a massive trek along a creek to a lone toilet. No mobile phones back then, no head torches, no lighting near the toilet- pitch black. No sink in the toilet, we had to wash our hands in the creek.

During the night, our wet tent collapsed on us. If we needed the toilet, we had to find the toilet paper in a bag outside the teaches tent and go and dig a hole. In the morning, a girl in my tent found a tick in her head and 2 others had leeches on them. I was convinced I'd die from toxic shock. I clearly survived, but it was such awful at the time during school.

Having to play netball/hockey in the sleet once it turned to snow we were allowed in (and not allowed to wear tracksuits)

communal showers (not very warm) with our pe teacher watching us she made us feel very uncomfortable

the art teacher who was a known perv joining in our cricket games as apparently he was an expert 🙄 (he was arrested by the police and never seen again)

sounds typical of an all girls 80’s school

And having your period was absolutely no excuse apart from swimming lessons

I was only little when I was at school so a lot of the equipment eg that horse was impossible for me to jump over whereas the taller girls managed with no problem.

Another one signing up for the sheer torture of cross-country running in fucking winter. So utterly hideous.

We had one pair of sports plimsolls (because it was the 80s and no one had specific shoes for specific sports back then at school) and we were expected to run around a sodden field and through a muddy wood in plimsolls wearing nothing other than tiny shorts and our short sleeved aertex PE shirt. All of us would have arms and legs that looked like mud spattered gammon and that was if we were lucky enough to have not have slipped over in our non-gripping shitty plimsolls. It was usually raining and represented 80 minutes of sheer misery followed by the god awful showers. Barely tepid water dribbling out of shitty lime crusted shower heads. There were individual cubicles but no curtains, so no one washed properly and we would all spend the rest of the day smelling of damp mud. When I'd get home my mother would go ballistic because the shit bald towel she'd given me was covered in mud, as were my plimsolls and shorts, so I'd have to hand wash them myself in the outside sink which had no hot water. Such happy memories!

I hated outdoor hockey for the same reasons. Loved playing it indoors but outdoors was the same unpleasantness as cross-country running just with sticks.