Should sports day be optional?

[Nothinglefttosaynow]

I remember dreading sports day as a child, I was slow & awkward and always near the end if not last. It was public embarrassment for me & I dreaded it. My nephew has sports day next week & is already worrying about it. He is fit and healthy but not a fast runner & has come last for the past 3 years. I absolutely agree with kids taking part in sport at school & at home, but I wonder if forcing kids who clearly don't enjoy it to participate in front of a crowd is fair.

My DC school has started being more inclusive. It is an arts and sports day now. The kids with disabilities or who dislike sports are allowed to either do a competitive activity or a creative one. So last year the competitive activity was team that builds the tallest Lego tower (everyone gets same box of blocks) wins a prize. Other kids can just individually do art, draw the people doing sports outside or inside if they prefer quiet and imaginative drawing. They did allow children to do some sport and some art- the children with long Covid for example can choose to only do the egg and spoon race and rest of the time go inside and relax and draw or stay outside and cheer on their house. You only have to sign up to races you want to do.

No it shouldn’t be optional, but it should be different to the traditional version.

The pressure should be on schools to make it enjoyable for everyone, including- in fact especially- those who are not naturally sporty. I believe that ought to be the aim of school sport/PE generally.

It should be perfectly possible to design a sports day that isn’t competitive or at least has plenty of non competitive events. One that has physical tasks without it mattering who comes first or jumps highest.

Yep - just a line or two, not whole songs.

I very much doubt that this is the norm now, then.

No life is about doing things you don't want to do, but that you should do because it's the best thing in the long run. Sports day is the perfect example. We give kids too many outs these days and the result of the newest generation in the workplace is a cohort of individuals who lack resilience and confidence, with little appetite for risk. I disliked sports day but there are a lot of positives I took from getting through it and surprising myself with my own abilities.

Everyone has to do stuff they don't like. It's not like that they don't know whose in the lower groups for maths etc. You can't just not take part in a maths test because you don't like it, no can I pull the kids out of art because despite being over 12 they can draw a recognizable stick man. The children need to have the opportunity to be able to shine at different things.

I think YABU. I hated sports day too but we have to do stuff we don't like at school. I have to do stuff I don't like at work. That's life.

Even when I was a school we all know the kids in set 5 English and Maths were a bit thick. But generally it was the set 5 kids who were the bullies so didn't need to worry about it too much - they would bully people for being nerds. You don't really get the same in sport with the slow runners bullying the fast runners.

No one should be ridiculing anyone at a school sports day.
There's nothing wrong with being last anyway. Someone has to be last otherwise no one can be first.
Better to participate and be last than refusing to take part in case you lose. Declining anything challenging in case you fail is not a good life lesson.
Speaking as someone who came last every year despite being the oldest in my class!

But most of life has fuck all to do with being first or last at anything. As I said before, being ridiculed for being shit at sport wasn't good training for doing things outside my comfort zone at all. It wasn't in any way helpful for my future life, because never in my life since has it been compulsory for me to demonstrate how shit I was at something in front of a large audience of my peers. Also, any stuff I've done outside of my comfort zone has been for my benefit - which doing school sports never was.
If coming last is so great why do sports managers get fired and footballers deselected - no-one tells them they are performing an important service by making the better teams/players look good - they just get told to fuck off.

Declining anything challenging in case you fail is not a good life lesson.
It isn't declining in case of failure. Failure is a guarantee - it's the spectacle of having to perform the failure in front of all my peers - can't you see the difference? I have not been unadventurous since school, but sports day taught me nothing except institutions can construct cruel and unusual punishments for no good reason and they are best dodged if possible.

Yes definitely they don't do academic tests once a year to see who wins top spaces in maths, English etc as everyone knows kids have varying abilities so why force sports days on kids who don't enjoy them. This is said as a parent of 3 kids. One who excels at sports, one who isn't sporty and excels academically and one who is still a bit young to be sure but looks to be very academic so far. I hated sports days as a asthmatic.

Thankfully my work has been nothing like the stupid spectacle of school sports days.

Wow. I really hope you don’t have children, for everyone’s sake..

well in my experience, the kids asked eg to sing solos etc are the ones who are good at it, or at least the ones who want to. Individual sports are absolutely not the same as singing/acting in a group

This is utter shit. One serious lesson I did learn from this eventually is that lots of twats will keep on banging on about "having to do stuff you don't like" as if it's some kind of virtue to put up with all kinds of pointless shit when it really isn't.
I've faced up to.a lot of challenges and I don't lack resilience, but being called useless for being shit at sport didn't help a bit with any of that.

Everyone does have to do PE, sports day is different. I genuinely think those who say it’s good for kids to exhibit their lack of ability, not just in front of classmates but also in front of a group of unknown adults and the rest of the school have absolutely no idea about how to build confidence in children. Nobody is reading out the results of the maths exam to that audience, or pointing out that little Jimmy can’t behave as well as everybody else. It’s cruel, and don’t imagine the kids don’t feel it.

Plus, as pp’s have pointed out, it can be done in a way which includes everyone while still celebrating the sports stars

Totally right.

I actually think that a better life lesson to instil in kids is that they don't have to do things they don't like doing, especially if those things are pointless bullshit that doesn't benefit them. They will get much further in adult life if they learn to recognise the pointless bullshit from the stuff that matters (to them), and be able to discard the former.

I was neither a sporty kid nor a team player and I tended to just refuse to take part in Sports Day. When I was very young I'd take my book along and just sit at the side and glare at any adult trying to jolly me into participating. When I was a teenager I'd either walk the cross-country with my friends and rock up at the finishing line three hours after everyone else, or just skive completely. Just didn't care.

Twenty years on I run 20km twice a week - school PE can take zero responsibility for this - and sometimes I encounter school cross-country kids and laugh inside because I still identify with the ones slouching sulkily at the back.

But yes, bugger resilience. Do as much as you enjoy as possible and as little of the other stuff. You only have one life.

Excellent post!

I don’t think it should be optional. There might be merit in not inviting parents etc to spectate - we don’t watch them all do maths and see who’s best at it!

Or it should be done in a way that doesn’t “show them up” if they’re not sporty, certainly at primary age.

For those saying it teaches valuable lessons: Please tell me how many adults are being humiliated in public by people in authority.

It is not acceptable to force anyone into public humiliation, especially kids.

@GertrudePerkinsPaperyThing my son's primary school does a day like this. They call it a sportathlon and the parents don't come, all I know is to send him in in his PE kit on date X and that he'll be having fun playing games all day.

But after that they do a traditional sports day!

Sports days have so many benefits:

1. It teaches children to have a growth mindset as they'll see how much they improve with a bit of effort
2. It teaches them how to be a good winner and loser...and not to cheat. Children should learn how to be kind, good sportsmen and cheer on their peers.
3. It tells them that it's best not to live in a comfort bubble. They may even surprise themselves. This will help.them in other areas of life such as academics
4. It gets kids away from screens. Exercise gets overweight kids moving. It improves mental health. Failure in front of peers is good motivation to train and improve.
5. Sometimes a job involves things you don't enjoy but you need to do to for the greater good or long term plans. Best to harness that lesson early so you don't wimp out of that presentation to the CEO when it really counts!
6. Childhood is about learning harsh lessons in a safe and fun environment. Better then than later in life. It gets much harder. I see lots of gen X in the workplace with so much fear as they haven't learnt to embrace failure.
7. Compulsory sports is a big thing in the independent school system. State parents should want their kids to have the same advantages. It's that grit that gets kids good universities and good jobs.
8. It encourages team building and teamwork skills.

Didn’t do any of that for my dyspraxic autistic daughter. It traumatised her.

Sports days have so many benefits for some children but not all. There you go, fixed it for you.

Childhood is about learning harsh lessons in a safe and fun environment.

Interesting take on what childhood is about.