Forced march for school kids

Fun for some...

From the ABC:

School children in Western Australia are being made to participate in traditional Australian sports such as cricket as part of a campaign to tackle obesity.

The Education Minister, Mark McGowan, says statistics show 30 per cent of girls and 23 per cent of boys in the state are overweight.

The government has made it compulsory for all students in years one to ten to do a minimum of two hours physical activity a week.

[...]

"So that kids can now at school for two hours a week play sports like cricket, athletics, tag-footy, netball, basketball, all those traditionally fun sports that are very important for growing up, very important for being healthy," he said.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who was forced to play "traditionally fun sports" including the above and grew to detest most of them.

Netball was something that I had to play a couple of times on primary school sports days because it was the 'girl's sport'. The boys got to play soccer. Hated netball.

Cricket. Don't even get me started on cricket. In fact, I hate any sport played with a bat and ball- cricket, baseball and softball are some of the most boring sports ever invented. I'm sure a spot of backyard and beach cricket is fun, but being marched off to stand around in a field with the sun in your eyes only to be jeered if you miss a catch 20 minutes later because you've fallen asleep on your feet is not fun. I detested cricket in school, and I still do now.

Athletics was something I only ever participated in a couple of times. Shot puts were heavy, javelins awkward, running was a chore- we usually had someone yelling at us and threatening us with more laps if we didn't hurry up. Besides, I wasn't very good at any of it. At least I don't hate athletics now. In fact, I actually enjoy running, when I don't have to push myself. Mustn't have been forced to do all that much of it in school after all. Also, it's something you can do by yourself when the mood takes you, it doesn't require a team or any equipment apart from a comfortable pair of shoes. Not bad.

Basketball- I think I played basketball at school at some point. I vaguely remember falling over on one of the outdoor asphalt/gravel courts and taking a whole heap of skin off my palm. Still, I played it socially on friday nights with some of my friends and enjoyed it, although I've never played it since and I'm not interested in watching it either (it's no fun when the game is full of uber tall people who just pock the ball in from enormous distances).

Tag-footy: presumably Mr McGowan is referring to the game I know as 'touch footy'. This involves my all time favourite school PE story of all:

One week we played touch footy for our weekly PE class. I caught the ball incorrectly and it somehow hit my ring finger end-on. It swelled up to twice its normal size and hurt like hell and over the next couple of weeks went variously blue, purple yellow and green. I couldn't bend it. A week later it was still discoloured and disfigured, not to mention painful, and I had a piano exam in 3 weeks' time, so I got a note from my mother asking for me to be excused from playing touch football the next week for that reason. The PE teacher absolutely went off his head at me, saying he could understand if I had an upcoming footy match or something and needed to recuperate for that(!), but being excused for a piano exam was "pathetic".

For well over a year I could not bend my left ring finger down to touch my palm. I can now, but to this day, it sometimes gets 'locked' in place when I do so, and I have to use my right hand to make it straight again.

Fuck PE. Forcing kids to participate in those sports will probably drive more of them away from those games than it will create lifelong good habits for physical activity.