Teen Take Over Tuesday – Rugby sucks…

Hi, teen here, reporting for the first-ever Teen Takeover Tuesday. Now, this is not the first Teen Takeover Tuesday but the name has recently changed from Tween Takeover Tuesday to Teen Takeover Tuesday. The reason for this: I, teen, have recently graduated from tween to teen. In more formal words – I turned 13!! My mum says I make her feel old.

Today I’m going to talk about one of the things I loathe the most. Rugby. Now, I’m not talking about tag rugby that you play in primary school, have fun with and most importantly never get hurt whilst playing it. I’m talking about full contact, secondary school, rugby.

There are a few reasons I absolutely despise full contact rugby.

Number One: It always rains before I have a PE lesson making the rugby pitch extremely wet and as slippery as an ice rink in Antarctica. This means that the second you step onto the pitch you start falling all over the place. Within 10 minutes of the lesson the entire class is covered from head to toe in mud and at least three people will fall over every five minutes. Now, you may think this is absolutely hilarious and might be thinking that doesn’t sound so bad – a bit of mud never hurt anyone. But it starts to get less fun when you take part in a very muddy PE lesson and forget you have lessons after PE. With four minutes to get changed and clean the layers of mud off every inch of your skin, it is very annoying and is in the least bit funny, especially when your break is at risk if you don’t get out of the changing rooms on time. It’s also not funny when you get home and your mum says she will hose you down in the garden and moans about your muddy kit in her washing machine.

Number two: I hate full contact rugby is: I have a joint condition called hypermobility. You might know this as double joints. This means that my joints can move beyond the normal range of motion. I have hypermobility in all my joints. Hypermobility also means that my joints can sprain and dislocate very easily. I get scared when doing full-contact rugby because if I fall and land badly on my hips, knees, ankles, shoulders or pretty much any joint in my body I could sprain or even worse dislocate them very easily. Everyone hates getting injured right? Well, I hate it even more than people usually do because another side effect of having a hypermobile joint is: when I get injured it takes double the normal amount of time to heal. Two years ago I had a bad soft tissue injury in my knee. This type of injury usually takes within six to eight weeks to heal but my injury took nearly six months to fully heal.

Number three: I really, really don’t like full contact rugby is: during most of the lessons and all of the matches we have to wear a gum shield to protect our teeth from being knocked out. I hate wearing a gum shield because as soon as I put it in I start to gag a lot. It sometimes even makes me feel like I want to throw up. Another downside to having to wear a gum shield is: For instance: if you didn’t put it in for the warm-ups and were planning on putting it in after you had finished the rather muddy exercises. This becomes a problem straight away. I mentioned that the warm-ups are extremely muddy right? Well, this means that your hands as well as everything else got mud on them meaning you don’t have a clean part of your skin to grab the gum shield and put it in your mouth. This then causes you to not be able to put your gum shield in and are at risk of losing your teeth for the rest of the lesson. There are four solutions to this problem. There is only one good option though. Number one is: Put your gum shield in before you leave the changing room and don’t take it out until you can clean your hands. Number two is: don’t put your gum shield in and be at risk of losing your teeth and costing your parents’ thousands of pounds. Number three is: take your gum shield out onto the field and put it into your mouth after the warm-ups with very muddy hands – which could risk you getting sick. I think we can all see the only good option here. Number four is: just don’t play rugby. Unfortunately this option doesn’t work at school as every student is required to take part, unless of course you are sick or injured. At the start of rugby last week I said to my friend: “this could get pretty bad as the weeks goes on.” She agreed and we made a deal that if rugby got really bad we would help each other break our legs so we wouldn’t have to take part in rugby anymore.

My mum says I clearly don’t like rugby, judging from how long this blog post is.

What sport did you hate playing at school?

PS My school is really good about my joint issue, but I do still have to do PE, because exercise is actually very important for people with my joint issues, and if I do hurt myself or am worried my teacher does let me stop.