Some people in my high school absolutely loved gym class. They would go to the gym whenever they had study hall and would sometimes even skip class to join a friend's gym class so that they could have as much gym in the day as possible. I was definitely not one of those people. The thought of having to spend a longer time in gym than my hour and a half block every fourth day was more painful than the actual experience of gym was.
Of course, it probably didn’t help that my hand-eye coordination was hardly better than that of a newborn. There were days every now and then when I’d be decent at whatever we were doing (except for hitting baseballs, a skill I never once possessed), but there were 10 times as many days where I would absolutely suck. Although most people in my classes were pretty cool, quite a few of them must have groaned internally when I was put on their team.
I could accept that I was never going to be good at sports of any kind. The problem was that there was a certain group of people that I couldn’t stand. It wasn’t the teacher; he was actually really cool and not at all like a drill sergeant stereotype you might see in a TV show. Even the jocks weren’t bad; they were more worried about showing off and hanging out with their football buddies than about the fact that I was far from being on the same level of athleticism as them.
The ones who really got on my nerves were the try-hards. It’s OK to put forth an effort in gym class, but not when you treat the gym like a war zone in which you’re going to die if your team doesn’t win every single game. During my freshman year, there was a senior who asked me to roll a dodgeball over to him so that he could throw it at me, and then got mad when I was smart enough not to do so. It would’ve been one thing if he’d been doing me a solid and was willing to catch an easy toss so I’d be out of the game and not have to play. However, it was more about showing off how great he could be and being able to eliminate as many people as possible, which was annoying in his case, and in the case of everyone else like that.
Speaking of dodgeball, I learned quickly that I should never be the last one standing. I can’t catch worth crap to bring the rest of my team back in, and some of my classmates weren’t going to aim anywhere but the face. Usually, if I saw my team’s numbers were starting to diminish, I would make sure a flying ball brushed my leg, or even just pretend that it did even if it was a good mile away from me. I’m not proud of the fact that I quit easily, but sometimes it was the safest thing to do.
Baseball, which I mentioned my particular dislike for earlier, was the one sport that nobody could get out of. In football, I was able to run back and forth down the field and make sure I wasn’t in a convenient place for anyone to pass me the ball. I used similar tactics in basketball and soccer whenever I wasn’t feeling like taking on pressure. In baseball though, every person has to have a turn at bat at some point, and there was no such thing as a third strike in gym class. Therefore, I could swing and miss a hundred times, and I would still have to keep trying. The outfield wasn’t much better, as everyone on my team was so spread out that if the ball came my way, I couldn’t rely on anyone else to catch it for me.
I’m glad I was a good student in my other classes, so that I never hated high school for the academic reasons many of my classmates complained about daily. Actually, I liked most of my classes enough that by the time I left high school, I actually missed it quite a bit. However, I definitely did not miss gym class.
