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.

I think it should be optional.

I was a sporty kid, i very occaisionally won but usually came in the top few, one day i was chosen to represent the school for long distance running (with a couple of others) at a county thing. Long story short i was up against some very fast people and came last by many minutes. In that scenario it was good for me to experience failiure but I remember feeling embarassed about my time etc and if that happened every time I raced against average people I would feel very shit.

🤣

By that logic all kids should do their exams orally on a stage in front of a load of people. Especially the ones who are bad at the subject.

At primary level it is a free for all which most children enjoy, and honestly it is impossible to know who came first or what the fuck was going on, if my son's school is anything to go by.

Yeah same, and I think anyone wanting to keep their child off a sports day like that is probably projecting their own issues, tbh.

My school used to do the throwing/jumping sports with no-one watching, so you go and do the long jump at 10am (in a group of 10) then come back to maths. That was good as you can have a go but only the top scorers were announced.

I was VERY good at sport and often won sports day prizes for running and high jump. Still hated every second of sports day.

Sports days are horrid. If it were fun, a games day aimed at enjoying physical activity with games like rounders, bean bag tossing, obstacle races etc with less emphasis on the competition, it would be better for "useless at traditional sports" kids like I was. Running races etc is crap unless it's your thing. Those kids compete anyway. It's ritual humiliation for everyone else. As you can tell, I'm still scarred....

I loved the way our kids primary did sports day. It started with about an hour of different activities done in house teams on the school field - so the teams moved around all the different sports stations, doing activities such as jumping,throwing a bean bag into a target, scoring a goal, throwing a foam javelin. These activities were compulsory. Parents could follow their child around the field, but the teams were small and were done as more of a team-game activity, with points awarded for the team.

Then there was a session of running races - sprint, longer race, sack race etc, which was optional. If the kids didn't want to do it, they didn't have to, and they could sit and cheer on their team mates. There were enough kids who did want to.

It was usually a really lovely afternoon, and the kids seemed to enjoy it - even the less sporty ones like my DD!

I think they should focus more on team stuff- why not rounders, cricket, relay races etc. and less on the competitive stuff, or maybe traditional races just for those who want to do it. DD is very sporty and always does well but it’s horrible for the kids that don’t, and it’s not comparable to anything else as no one has to do their times tables quiz in front of the whole school and all the parents.

No it shouldn't be optional.

Kids are being sheltered too much from things now which means they are not set up to cope as adults when they come across a stressful situation. They have to learn that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to. But you get through it and survive. It's no wonder there's so many working age people not working with anxiety when they've never been able to practice coping skills when they're younger.

Totally agree with previous post that resilience is an important thing to be learned.

All these people saying it teaches resilience and people need to learn about competition and doing difficult things are really missing the point.
I have been plenty competitive, done loads out of my comfort zone and even enjoyed physical activity since leaving school. None of it has involved being ritually humiliated by an audience of my peers for being shit at something over which I had no control.

Total bollocks

My teenage dd isn't academic or sporty, she hates sports day so I didn't make her go this year. Tbf to the school though its a sport and games day, so they try to make it as inclusive and fun as possible. Parents aren't invited, so that takes some of the pressure off too.

It depends how the school organises it.

We always organised it in across year group teams in KS2 with everyone mixed up, so sporty kids spread through the teams, plus non sporty kids spread through teams as well. Kids could choose their events in advance , and some weren’t about speed but were about team work or throwing or other skills, at the end of the session points were added up and the winning team all got gold stickers. Losing teams all got silver stickers. It was a huge amount of organisation in a big school, but it meant everyone took part and everyone went home with something stuck on their t shirt. The highlights were the teachers races and the parents races.

KS1 did circuit activities, again lots of different things to do, not all about being fast.

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.

That's how some kids feel about maths lessons all the time, or French, or music, or science. No, it shouldn't be optional.

I hated sports day at school with a passion. Though my school house won it the 3 years I did it in the juniors. One year, it rained most days in late May and June (my school broke up at end June) that we had no sports day! Yippee! I was that kid that finished last. But for some unknown reason when I was at high school, I decided to throw the discus with my left hand - I'm right handed and my late DGM was left handed and was called up to do the area sports and I finished 3rd in the discus throwing left handed. Not thrown a discus since.

Another thing related to sports/PE is the dreaded beep test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-stage_fitness_test Unsure schools do this today. It was horrible, for asthmatics. You ran between two points before you heard the beep played on tape (probably a MP3 file on teachers' phones or tablets) and the gap between decreased slightly each time. I was forced to do a few more shuttles than my body could take. This caused my first asthma attack. Ambulance called and was ok not to go to hospital. Each week when the beep test was done, one kid fell ill.

What? 🤣 I loved sports day. I play a competitive sport now and exercise most days.

Both if my kids are sporty, but one hated sports day so I didn’t send her. No projection, no drama.

Incorrect and irrelevant comparison.

This.
Resilience isn't built by humiliation.
If the setup is about games rather than pure competitive races, then yes, I'm all for it. Tug of war, brilliant. Space hopper race, even better. Crawling under net on obstacle course, lots of fun.
Line up against 7 other kids and run as fast as you can for 100m and come in miles behind everyone else? Yeah, the fun is pretty much absent, isn't it?

Children don’t generally have to perform in front of the class for Maths or French though. Rightly so.

I loathed sports day in primary school, it was horrible being forced from a young age to do things I was crap at publicly. PE was also a boring nightmare repeatedly doing rounders and other games letting the whole team down. It really put me off sport.

Secondary school sports day was much better. You basically got to spend the day milling round in the sunshine with friends (we weren't made to sit with our class), and they had lots more individual type events like javelin where you went one at a time and got points based on how far it went, rather than being directly pitted against one another. They also emphasised you didn't have to do anything, but got one house point for every event you participated in - so me and unsporty friends would wander along to events and have a go and contribute a few points to our houses by the end of the day.

PE lessons also got better by year 10 when we could choose what we did to some extent, but I still hated sport/PE.

Yet by the age of 20, much to everyone's surprise, I was at outdoor college, regularly walking in the hills, climbing, kayaking, etc. Turns out I didn't hate all physical exercise, just PE lessons and the way it was taught at school. (I always known exercise was necessarily and was self conscious of my weight so walked everywhere but had seen it as a necessary evil!)

Now 20 years since those sports days, I am slim and fit, exercising regularly and eating well. It's not school sports days that will help people have a healthy attitude to exercise - they put me off for a long time.

I'm undecided on this...

The view that academic kids get their chances to shine, sporty kids get their chances in sports day has a few problems. Firstly as pps have said, the public nature of sports day is not the same as eg SATS results, which are not publicly announced. And, it ignores the fact that if a kid isn't great at maths, it doesn't necessarily mean they are great at sports instead - they could "fail" twice from their point of view. In fact, from experience the most sporty kids are also often among the more academic ones, although my 'sample' isn't big enough to draw real conclusions from that. Just to say that it doesn't necessarily follow that its sports or academics - often it's both, or neither.

I can see why there is this thinking as no one wants to see their child upset.

But throughout life no one can be protected at all times. When a work colleague is awful, when you don’t get the job you want, when your love dumps you. If a child is totally cherished and never ever upset then how will they handle upset as an adult.

I was mediocre at sports and never won a race but it shouldn’t be optional.

DD2 is severely dyspraxic. Her Reception sports day we had someone's grandfather openly howling with laughter at her attempts to participate in events.

This little girl is the most phenomenally resilient child you would ever meet - kept falling and getting back up and finished as last as you can possibly get - but this twat kept howling with laughter at her.

At the moment she'd choose to join in with it still, but if she ever decided she didn't want to - I'd back her 100% of the way.

Does the French lesson happen in front of the rest of the school? Does the whole school get to watch little Jonny struggle with his spelling?