My sporting career started back in junior school. I’m not sure whether cricket or soccer came first, but I know I was better at soccer. I know this because I actually remember playing a couple of soccer matches, whereas I only remember ever playing one cricket match.

I remember two things from the solitary cricket match I played. The first thing is that they cleverly had me up to bat last. I thought it would be funny to walk out with thigh pads on both my thighs, and I assume the opposing team thought it was funny too, because I didn’t go out first ball.

The second thing I remember was whilst fielding. I remember running after the ball and making a glorious slide to stop the ball from crossing the boundary. I remember feeling really proud of myself as I threw the ball back towards the wicket, which in an obscure moment of improbable physics, actually arrived at the target I was aiming for. And I finally remember being told I had done that all for nothing because the ball was already out of play.

I was never destined to have much of a sporting career. And to be honest, it was obviously never a passion of mine. The majority of cricket practice in junior school was spent trying to find berries in the trees next to the cricket nets. Unfortunately they weren’t berries that helped induce co-ordination – I still somehow managed to get bowled at whilst walking across the cricket nets.

Soccer was my other sport in junior school, and obviously having full confidence in the rest of the team, my coach cunningly made me goal keeper. Having a waning interest in the matches, parents will probably remember me as ‘that kid who was climbing the goal posts during the game’. I’m fairly confident I never saved a goal, because I’m fairly confident there was no guarantee I would have been in the goal posts when the opposing team arrived there.

At some stage I was promoted to defense, which was fine with me, because there was less responsibility, and a larger opportunity to run off field and get water whilst the forwards were doing their thing. I’m guessing soccer wasn’t an incredibly big sport at my junior school, because I was in the B team, which definitely means there was no C team.

However, near the end of primary school I found success in one sport. I call it a sport lightly, because in reality the sport I was good at was jumping over a pole. It was hardly a talent as much as it was simply a result of being fairly light and having long legs. It’s effectively the same principle of giving midgets awards for limbo dancing.

Alright, to be fair, there’s more to high jump than what I’m describing, but it’s clear I don’t know what that is. I found this out when I went to an athletics day in high school, and suddenly my standard ability to jump didn’t really fair well against the shorter guys who were jumping over firetrucks.

I made my proper move to athletics in high school when I found my career in cricket to be less than lucrative. My departure from cricket probably had less to do with my lack of abilities, but rather my complete lethargy towards the sport, and the distinct lack of trees to scour berries from.

The main reason for signing up for athletics was because I misunderstood that it wasn’t compulsory to do a sport. Athletics is a terrible sport. Running has never been fun, and it never will be fun. Yes, it can be satisfactory knowing you’ve had a good work out, but that doesn’t mean you enjoy running – essentially, it means you enjoy not running, but only straight after a run.

Athletics is also a terrible sport if you’re only average at it. In most other sports you can enjoy being average, because you’re still part of a team, and are still contributing in some way. In athletics, unless you’re on the podium, you haven’t really accomplished anything - unless being tired and out of breath was your aim, in which case, I simply recommend stealing something and running from the police, because then at least you’ll get something out of it.

My high school was late into allowing soccer as a sport (presumably to encourage the coloured students to be as white as possible), and so volleyball became my winter sport until about grade ten when I realized that you wouldn’t constantly get detention if you weren’t found on a sports field.

My favourite sport is actually badminton. It’s one of the few sports I’m any good at, and that’s probably because instead of using a ball, you use the back of a peacock. I’d love to know how that sport started actually. I imagine two friends were fighting, one demanding to play tennis, the other demanding to play volleyball, and then in a scuffle they accidentally kill the budgie and have an epiphany.

In general, all sports are relatively ridiculous. People have ultimately created talents by giving random abilities some form of credit if expressed in a certain way. If sport didn’t exist as a profession, then this would be more glaringly obvious. “Hey man, what do you do?” “Oh, I’m just a doctor – a heart surgeon to be precise. You?” “Ah, nothing much… I’m just pretty good at kicking a ball.”