I’m 25 years old, and I can’t catch or throw a ball. When I was in elementary school, I tried participating in afterschool soccer, basketball, gymnastics, karate, and dance, but never with positive results. My gymnastics teacher even asked me to drop out after 4 years of being enrolled in the class because I never advanced past the first level. During P.E. time at school, everyone was required to play sports, so I would try, but games ended with me feeling alienated and stressed out.
Consequently, I was always picked last for every team sport – which was the single most humiliating thing I had been through as a 1st and 2nd grader.
Once when I was 6, I was standing in the middle of the field during an organized game of soccer with my classmates, so the teacher asked me which team I was on, and I said I didn’t know.
“Well, which way is your team going?” he asked. I didn’t know that either. “How do you not know which way your team is going?” he asked, raising his voice, exasperated. I felt instantly embarrassed, like a weird, freckled outsider who was unable of doing something that the rest of my classmates seemed not only able to do, but happy while they were doing it.
When I was 7, my parents took me to a physical therapist. After spending an hour watching me try to jump rope with all the gracefulness of a drunk snake, the therapist determined that I have gross motor delays. This means that I have difficulty performing basic motor skills, like running or catching and throwing a ball. Oh yeah, and I run funny, too.
After my diagnosis, I started attending a special “adapted P.E.” class after school two days a week, where we would practice basic athletic activities like catching a very large foam ball from two or three feet away, Because of the classes, I was then exempt from team sports during P.E. – but it meant that I had to hang out on the sidelines practicing throwing a basketball through a hoop or kicking a soccer ball through a goal by myself. This, of course, made me feel even more alienated than I already did.
The same thing happened in high school, until halfway through the year when I switched schools, going from a huge public school to the college preparatory charter, where P.E. was not a priority. The only way any student participated in sports is if their parents signed them up for extra-curricular volleyball or lacrosse. My parents, mercifully, did not.
Something that caused me so much grief when I was younger doesn’t matter to me anymore. If you toss a Frisbee at me, it will probably sail over my head, if we play soccer together, our team will definitely lose, and people actively don’t want to play beer pong with me because when I throw the ball it misses the table entirely and hits the wall.
But, I can write a decent article in my sleep, carry a tune, have more stories to tell than the next person, and I make the best nachos this side of the Mississippi. Everyone’s got their own thing, and sports aren’t mine, and that’s okay.
A version of this piece appeared in the March 16, 2016 issue of the Golden Gate Xpress, San Francisco State University’s student-led newspaper.
