I never did team sports.  I don’t remember ever really wanting to, and I never enjoyed sports in Young Women–I hated being told “good try” when I totally screwed up and dropped the ball/missed the basket/didn’t run fast enough.  It didn’t help that a couple of girls my age in the ward were pretty athletic and good at sports.  I probably played only one game of each of the sports we played in YW and then I was done.  Thank goodness Mom never made me go more than one or two times!

I also never really liked PE in junior high and high school; I usually ended up in the class with the girls who were on all the sports teams and I felt awkward and stupid playing against them.  I only really enjoyed tennis, badminton, shooting baskets (not the actual basketball games they made us play) or refereeing, running ladders (go figure), aerobics, playing catch when we did softball, and the juggling we learned in 9th grade.  Anything else I tried to avoid.  I’d pretend to get hit in dodge ball just so I could sit out and didn’t have to worry about one of the mean girls clocking me in the head with those red waffly balls.

Which brings us to the “sports injuries” I suffered:  I got hit in the head with just about every sports ball ever made.  I remember walking to my second or third grade classroom at Huntington Elementary and getting whacked in the head with a kickball.  It startled me and made me jump, but it didn’t really hurt that badly.  Once in junior high, during the softball unit, the teachers had us stand in two rows facing each other so we could catch and throw.  I liked catching and was decent with an underhand pitch and I was standing next to my friend Kristen (who happened to be very good at just about every sport available in junior high).  I think we were talking and I wasn’t really looking at the girl across from me and didn’t notice the ball was coming at my nose until too late.  Fortunately, although the softball hit me right between the eyes, it neither broke my nose nor my glasses.  I remember being worried that my nose would start bleeding, but all I did was sneeze and that was it.  No pain, no blood, nothing but a sneeze.

I guess I didn’t care to play sports enough to actually get injured, just embarrassed.  I took a ballroom dance class in college that I enjoyed, and I really liked archery even though I couldn’t pull a compound bow and used a recurve instead.  I’m sure it was more fun because it was MY idea and I wasn’t forced to do pull-ups or “fun runs”…