Sport...for all?

This week the Telegraph branded thousands of children “physically illiterate”, on account of them apparently not being able to run, jump or catch a ball. The article and subsequent comments (all 280 of them) and Twitter responses went on to hand-wringingly decry the selling off of school playing fields, the “health and safety gone mad” attitude of schools these days (“When I was a child we used to beat each other round the head with shotputs and it never did us any harm!”) and the aversion to competitive sport for fear it isn’t “inclusive” enough as possible reasons for this. Aside from the fact that the use of the word “illiterate” doesn’t strictly make sense here, and running, jumping and the ability to catch a ball are hardly key life skills, and regardless are not the be all and end all of physicality, it did nonetheless remind me, with a shudder, of my own schooldays. If I were 13 now and my school sold off our playing fields and told me hockey was too dangerous I would have jumped (except I wouldn’t, as I’d presumably be too physically illiterate to jump) for joy.

Mention school sports at any respectable adult gathering and the assembled are likely to shudder and compete for who has the most heartbreaking story of being picked last by their scowling, sniggering peers for whatever team game was being played. I often wonder what happened to all the kids who were picked first, or maybe they just don't admit to it for fear of revenge attacks. Statistically of course we can’t all have been picked last, but it goes to show that the problem of sport in schools is not a new one – generations of children have been failed, if not emotionally scarred, by the experience.

I consider myself to be not exactly unsporty. I was brought up on a diet of cricket and football and have followed the latter obsessively from a young age. My dad was even (for a short period) a professional footballer, and encouraged me to try all sorts of activities, from tennis (at which I was terrible) to badminton (at which I was surprisingly good, and even played for my county on one occasion). School, however, was a different ballgame altogether (see what I did there?) At junior school we played one winter game: netball. Netball is, in my personal opinion, a ridiculous game, full of silly rules that are contrary to everything your body wants to do (what the heck is pivotting?) and whose sole aim seems to be to prevent it from ever getting interesting. I would be a rich women if I had a pound for every time I managed through some happy accident to find myself holding the ball, only for my teacher to shriek “FOOTWORK!” at me because I hadn't stayed rooted to the spot, before giving the ball to the opposing team while my own shouted contemptuous insults at me for my idiocy. I spent most of my time as a goalkeeper, which meant standing around getting cold, and occasionally jumping up and down on the spot with my arms ludicrously stretched above my head in front of the opposition’s Shooter, who would inevitably score. Cue more contempt. I hoped that when I progressed to secondary school we might be offered a wider choice, and we were: in addition to the continuing pain of netball, we now had the agony of hockey, too. This increased not only the opportunities for the dominant, sporty types in my class to lord it over the rest of us unfortunates, but to occasionally whack us with a big wooden stick too, all under the approving eye of the sports teacher.

Now I’m sure there are nice sports teachers out there, but I’ve never met one. I sometimes wonder if adverts for sports teachers start with the sentence “We are seeking a motivated, sado-masochistic tyrant to oversee and implement a regime of torment and oppression across the whole school.” In the person spec “aggression” and “the ability to humiliate on demand” would be top of the list. I don’t recall any of my sports teachers ever teaching me anything, I just remember them shouting at me, and encouraging the favoured, sport-loving neanderthals in the class to join in. They seemed to have earmarked me and several of my peers as complete wastes of space, and from then on used us as objects of humour for evermore. “Where do you think this is, Oakvale?” one shrieked at me once (Oakvale being the local special school) following my ineptitude with a hockey stick. Laughter ensued from the other pupils, including nervous giggles from those who knew it could be them next, and desperately wanted to go unnoticed. On another occasion I came first out of 40 kids in an 800-metre run. I remember feeling a surge of pride (I have always liked running) but my achievement was greeted with “well, that was a fluke, wasn’t it?” (Erm, no. I just ran faster than everybody else.) Years later I bumped into this particular teacher and told her (in presumably some misjudged attempt to gain the respect I had never succeeded in getting at school) that I had recently run the BUPA 10K. Her response? “It just goes to show anyone can do it.”

Yes, anyone. Even a moron like me. But my point is that I was actually quite keen on sport, and yet the school system seemed to do everything it possibly could to put me off. I asked if I could join the tennis club, and was told, with a certain amount of scorn, that it was only for “good” players (which begs the question: how can I get any good if you won’t let me practise?); undeterred, I took up skating on Saturdays, only for my teacher to exclaim loudly, so that everyone could hear, “Good God, imagine you on SKATES!” Inevitably I became one of the kids that would locate an appropriate bush to skulk behind during cross country until a reasonable time had elapsed so we could then take a short cut and arrive back plausibly far down the pecking order. I put my subsequent musical prowess (I ended up singing with a national choir) down to the fact that the more musical activities I took part in at school, the more sport I was allowed to miss to make time for them. My memory of school sport was an environment of almost animalistic survival of the fittest, where the teachers led the bullying and encouraged the kids to join in – some of the language and attitudes displayed on the freezing hockey pitches and netball courts of my school would never have been tolerated in any other area of learning. (The fabulous Charlie Brooker recounts this far better than I can.) For my part, I now feel quite smug when I beat my 10K time, and as a spectator my interest in my football team borders on the obsessive, but I’m sure for others school sports was the start of a sedentary life. You don’t need to remove competition from schools for fear kids will get upset – kids shouldn’t mind losing, and even if they do, tough luck, they need to get used to it, but they should mind being disparaged and demeaned on a weekly basis in front of their baying contemporaries. A wider choice of sports would have made the whole experience more enjoyable, but a culture whereby achievement was celebrated whilst at the same time allowing sport to be fun even where one didn’t excel at it, and trying new things was positively encouraged, would have been healthier, and is crucial to bear in mind as the whole post-Olympics legacy analysis inevitably trundles on.