'I'll make sure I fail': Nonathletic teenager maliciously complies with school's walking club requirements

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Aug 20, 2024 11:00 AM EDT

This school had a brilliant plan for getting their students involved in sports teams: making it mandatory for every single kid. They probably thought it was an excellent idea. After all, you want kids to be active and moving around throughout the day… almost as if you could make a class for that. For some reason, this school decided that alongside gym class, all kids would have to join a sport. In my high school, maybe a third of the kids were in sports, and everyone else was in other clubs, or just didn't participate in anything else. Now imagine adding the other two-thirds of the students to the sports teams. You'd need tons of buses to transport everyone to away games; you'd need extra coaches to handle all the new athletes. You'd have soccer teams with like, a hundred kids on them. And in that case, I know not all 100 kids would be playing each time. The school would basically just be insisting kids attend sports games just to sit on the bench for the entire time. 

This person decided at first to just have a bad attitude about it all. Teens, am I right? But after realizing that wasn't going to work, they pivoted to an absolutely brilliant new tactic, which you can read all about in their malicious compliance confession below. 

Up next, these Facebook fanatics are still getting accustomed to the internet, and they're making mistakes that are way funnier than they should be. 

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  • 01
    TENNIS ACADEN NEVER LET
    via Folco Masi on Unsplash
  • 02
    Force me to take a useless sports physical? I'll make sure I fail it.
    via u/PilotLights
  • 03
    Some background: In high school, I went to an academic magnet school. Essentially it was a public school ran like a private school. You had to have certain test scores to get, no bus transportation (since it was for the whole county), way stricter dress code than all the other schools on the district, and they were able to have a ton of extra rules
    via u/PilotLights
  • 04
    because it was a "choice school." Now I was the first graduating class; I was there the first year it opened. At that time it was 5th-9th grade, and I startoed as a freshman. The second year they had completed the elementary wing, and so it was K-10.
    via u/PilotLights
  • 05
    They added grades until my senior year when it was finally K-12. As the school grew, it continued to add more policies. My sophomore year (the school's second year of being open), they began a new policy where ALL students 7th grade and above had to be on a sports team everywhere.
    via u/PilotLights
  • 06
    I thought this was really, really stupid. I hated it. I'm not an athlete; I was in other clubs, and I was getting increasingly involved with my church. Being the mature 16 year old I was, my initial plan was to join a team and have a bad attitude. Like an awful, evangelistically bad attitude so that no one would have any fun, and this would prove to the
    via u/PilotLights
  • 07
    school how awful this rule was. Instead, for all the lazy kids like me, they started a school walking team. It wasn't power walking - just regular walking. We just had to walk around the neighborhood for about 45 minutes 3x a week after school.
    via u/PilotLights
  • 08
    I was fine with this; I didn't mind walking around. Of course there was an adult 'coach', but since the whole thing was ridiculous anyways, my friend and I declared ourselves co- captains. This mostly consisted in telling the middle schoolers to walk faster. No one else considered us co-captains, but we did, and that's all that mattered to us since it
    via u/PilotLights
  • 09
    was all a joke anyways. I did that my sophomore and junior years, but fast forward to my senior year. I was 18, working part time about 15-20 hours a week, I was super involved in my church, and my family was a chaotic mess of dysfunction that traumatized me in numerous ways.
    via u/PilotLights
  • 10
    They finally enforced the state law that everyone on a sports team has to have an annual physical on file. I didn't really bother with this since it wasn't a real sport anyways. Eventually, they came to me and said that it was so late in the season that even if I got a physical, I would need to pick a different sport in the winter or spring (walking team was a fall sport).
    via u/PilotLights
  • 11
    I was essentially just "screw this"; I had enough other things in my life to deal with, and I didn't want to put up with this anymore. I decided to do exactly what they say and get the physical; i also decided I would do my best to fail it. So eventually I went and saw a doctor. It's important to note that I didn't have a
    via u/PilotLights
  • 12
    primary care doctor at the time; that's why I didn't get a physical before then. So I just went to some little walk-in clinic, and I tell them I need a sports physical. I didn't tell them what the sport was. Now as I was filling out the patient history form, I answered truthfully; I did not lie, but I didn't provide any context. So I checked yes to a history of asthma
    via u/PilotLights
  • 13
    (mostly from when I was a kid), severe seasonal allergies, AND a history of seizures. See when I was 13 I had a couple dozen seizures in a day or two; no one knew what was going on, and eventually I was diagnosed with epilepsy specifically having 'absence seizures.' Since then, I had been taking anti-convulsants
    via u/PilotLights
  • 14
    every day. As far as I am aware - even 20 years after that initial episode, I'm not sure I've had a full blown seizure since then. It's literally the mildest case of epilepsy I've ever heard of. The doctor does a quick physical exam - mostly vitals. and similar things. As she looks at my patient history form, she asks about the seizures, I explain that I was
    via u/PilotLights
  • 15
    diagnosed with epilepsy, I take anti-convulsants, and I have a neurologist I see about once or twice a year. She says "well i can't pass you until I hear from your neurologist." I basically hopped out of the chair, happily said "thank you" and walked out. I never did contact the neurologist; instead, i just gave the paperwork to the school.
    via u/PilotLights
  • 16
    And that's how I (a relatively healthy 18 year old) got medically disqualified from the school walking team.
    via u/PilotLights
  • 17
    WhoHayes Best PE credit (college) I took was backpacking and Hiking. Class met 3 times. 1st was meet professor, syllabus, and basic what you need.
    via u/WhoHayes
  • 18
    2nd was day hike in a state park. 15 mile I think (was 30ish years ago) 3rd was 2 days, 35 miles. Another state park, stayed at parks campground. I was the only one (out of 17 or so) who brought coffee. Easiest A ever.
    via u/WhoHayes
  • 19
    Automatic_Promise_58. One of my boys went to a magnet school. They tried to make him do PE. He has horrid exercise induced asthma, but they wouldn't excuse him for that. I got him excused based on the fact that he was too small to fit the required uniform.
    via u/Automatic_Promise_58
  • 20
    He was still a size 4-5 the smallest uniform was a size 7-8. I could have altered it (I'm pretty good with a sewing machine) but they didn't ask. Boohoo no PE.
    via u/Automatic_Promise_58
  • 21
    [deleted] My son is allergic to being hot. His whole body turns to hives. The school argues with me about every 4 months asking for a new letter from the peds office. I now just have a stack of photo copied letters to turn into the school.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 22
    PilotLights OP Oh man. That's awful. Thankfully it's not that bad for me.
    via u/PilotLights
  • 23
    tuna_tofu See here in the Washington DC we have academic magnet schools that dont even HAVE sports - no teams, no PE. (Of course many don't have the extra of drivers ed, home ec, art, band, etc either JUST ACADEMICS focused on science, languages, etc). So yeah. Im not getting the whole sports push either.
    via u/tuna_tofu
  • 24
    Flaxscript42 This is the most high school thing I've read in a long time.
    via u/Flaxscript42

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teens school sports malicious compliance kids malicious-compliance-reddit sport teacher high school malicious compliance reddit
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