By Renee
As seen from my NAPFA scores, I am not athletic. Whenever PE came around in primary school, I would sigh and feel a wave of anxiety, terror and inadequacy wash across me. Obviously, I did not enjoy it, but not just playing sports, watching sports. I felt confused and a bit angry at those who screamed and yelled and cheered whenever their team won or lost… wait was that why? I didn’t know, because I didn’t care.
(Above: An accurate representation of what I did not like about people who liked sports.)
Then when secondary school started, it was almost exactly the same. I hated PE in Year 1 as much as I did in P6 and I did not care at all whether my team won or not. I remember when we were playing netball, some of my friends and I formed a “suicide squad”. We did not want to let others down even though we did not care for winning, so we formed a team that played absolutely terribly. We just had fun pointing out how cool and awesome people who were athletic looked.
Then one day, I started watching a sport. Figure skating. Now, granted that it is not a very “macho” or typical sport, I think it does count as it has sweat, scores, medals and cheering fans. Then I started to understand why people cared so much. Sports are a way to bond with others, relax and escape from reality for a while. When you are passionately cheering from the courtside for your friends playing netball, or in my case, screaming at a TV for a bunch of people sliding on ice somewhere in Europe, you are not thinking about how your Mother Tongue project is due in two days, instead you are filled with adrenaline and a confetti-like array of emotions.
Anyway, after I started to like watching sports, I started to like doing sports, at least a little bit more. Running around the track was probably less intensive than what those figure skaters do every day to train, I would think. Then I would feel less upset.
That has been my experience with sports and physical activities. If you were like me and loathed PE, try to start watching a bunch of different sports. Maybe you will like one and that will be a gateway into more enjoyable PE lessons. If you already like PE, then that’s great! Continue doing that! Life is better when you enjoy more things, except you know, drugs.
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