Teaching children to be athletic

I just saw a CNN report about obesity in children. The report closed with a feature on a woman dedicated to teaching kids about physical fitness by having fun with sports, weightlifting and cardio.

That report sent me on a flashback.

7th grade. El Paso, TX. Coach Stowe was my P.E. teacher. For P.E. class he took to the YMCA to play basketball.

One day Coach Stowe decided it would be fun to pit the most athletic kids against the least athletic kids. I was on the bad team. We lost and it was humiliating. And I remember thinking "this sucks and I hate this."

That game was one example of what my gym coaches in grade school taught me: that I wasn't athletic, I sucked at sports, and P.E. class was not fun and something that I should fear.

What I should have been learning then was basic game strategy. The thrill of competition. That there was more to life than video games and pop-tarts. And so on.

Instead I learned to dread P.E. and sports. Every day I stood against the wall of that gym and waited to get picked last or next-to-last. Only "The Boz" got picked after me. Back then when that kind of thing really mattered to me, that sucked. And that "getting picked last" thing spilled over into the rest of school. Athletic kids were generally cooler.

Coach Stowe should have been paying attention to the least athletic kids in his class and working with them to find ways to get them integrated into the games and get them to enjoy themselves. I believe that his intentions were good... but that one day of pitting best vs. worst really sucked.

I hope that P.E. coaches today get that.

Teach kids to love sport.

Now that I'm a little older and a little more athletic... it would be AWESOME to play basketball against Coach Stowe. Or better yet, some kind of contact sport like football.

Comments

[Ezequiel]

My coach Stowe memory? I was the only person to get enough point to merit the Presidential Physical Fitness award one year (don't remember if it was 86 or 87) even though I wasn't on any organized team sport (I hated them for probably the same reason you did). The tests were your run of the mill push ups, sprints, pull ups, this sort of thing. Never got the certificate or the award. Funny how you remember the little things that seemed unjust to you....

[chris motes]

The funny thing is that I think I remember the contest where you (and others) were measured for this award. I think you did like 20 pullups. I could do zero, which was a little low.

[tacfit warrior review]

in my opinion teaching a kid to be athletic just as important as teaching them to be look smart or telling them the importance of education