Hockey

You might remember climbing to the ceiling on bristly ropes, cartwheeling across mats, and running miles every day. No safety precautions whatsoever, the teacher is just there to get paid. When gym was actually gym. The ropes were torn down and gymnastics was long forgotten by public school curriculums. It’s been replaced with bins of basketballs and soccer balls, shiny training-wheel bicycles for those who learned to ride a bike long ago, and electric heart rate monitors and stop watches.

If you have a substitute in gym, everyone in Pennsburg knows you have a long hour of basketball ahead of you. That can’t sound too bad, right? Well, after you’ve been playing basketball since first grade, it gets a little old. No one even plays games anymore; we just wander around, aimlessly shooting baskets every now and then. Even the guys hate it, which is really saying something. Each year, you learn the same “techniques” over and over, a couple weeks of floor hockey, a soccer unit, and a few days of Frisbee. Every now and then, they throw in some new unit like bad mitten or bicycling. “This is how you hold the hockey stick-“ I sigh, my elbows wresting on my knees. I tune out Mr. Reichard, leaning toward Kat. “If I hear how to hold a hockey stick again next year, I’m quitting gym.” Kat rolls her eyes. “If you could quit gym, half of the school would’ve done it already.” Mr. Reichard holds out a “safety squishy ball” for us violent high schoolers, demonstrating how to properly hit it with the hockey stick. “…Do not bring the hockey stick above your waist.”

We separate into teams and grab our hockey sticks, scuttling out to the middle of the gym, all of us right-out disobeying the rules of hockey. In Middle School, everyone would go along with the rules, but now that we’re in high school, we’ve gotten tired of hearing the same rules every year, so we figure we might as well just go against everything teachers have told us since first grade. Probably not the smartest thing to do, no wonder they keep telling us the rules over and over, but we make it fun. People kick the ball with their feet when Mr. Reichard isn’t looking, and some brave souls even bend down to grab the ball and throw it across the room. When we hit the ball, we use a golf swing, and we all high stick. On purpose. What can I say? We’re rebels.