THEY SAY SCHOOL days are the best days of your life.
Most of us cherish our childhood memories and look back fondly on a time when lifelong friendships were formed, while your biggest worry revolved around getting that night’s homework done.
PE represented a welcome break from classes and very often offered kids the chance to experience certain sports for the very first time.
Then there may have been the joy you felt after making it onto school teams and that pride attached to representing them.
And who could forget the novelty events that took place every sports day — the egg and spoon race, the three-legged race, the sack race, rounders and tug-of-war to name a few.
We want to hear about those big little sporting moments that you still remember vividly from school. It could be anything from captaining your side to victory in the county final to enjoying a game of Snatch the Bacon with classmates.
To get you started, we put the question to some of our colleagues and here’s what they came back with:
I lied about being able to play soccer in senior infants and got to do that Samba Soccer thing in the hall. Missed a load of class and got a free t-shirt for doing tricks really badly.”
We won a county league and championship with the schoolboy football team two years in-a-row. We called it the double-double because we were classsssss.”
When an RTÉ show at the time called ‘Rapid’ came to our school to film us doing hurling skills and I got picked as one of the lucky few. Although the segment only ended up being a couple of minutes and you couldn’t make any of us out on the telly, we did get to meet the hosts, Jason Sherlock and Kathryn Thomas.”
I don’t remember much about school sports, except that when we were doing relays and races in the yard for PE, we were instructed to only do ‘silent cheers’ if our team won so we wouldn’t disturb other students in class. So everyone would be standing there throwing their arms up in the air and whispering ‘YAAAAAY’ like genuine weirdos.”
Finding out I was inexplicably good at the high jump (in the confines of my class). I Fosbury-flopped my way to a knockout victory before reality set in when the bigger boys got involved on sports day.”
We reached the Cumann na mBunscoil final when I was in sixth year and got to play in Breffni Park. It was the only time I’ve ever played on the main pitch there, and that certainly wouldn’t happen nowadays.”
In our school, we used to do the potato and spoon race rather than the egg and spoon for some reason, and I never won anything. I do recall speeding away delighted with myself one year after getting to the finish line ahead of all the boys. Little did I realise, I had dropped the potato shortly after the start line!”
Back in 1995, Paul Curran and John O’Leary brought the Sam Maguire in to us after Dublin had won the All-Ireland football final. The whole school attended an assembly in the hall, and the best part about it was that we got a half-day.”
Feel free to share your stories in the comments section below.
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