I grew up with a mom who, being a child of the 50s, had a lot of straight up fear around her daughters being athletic or participating in sports. (Every person is a mystery, and I’m assuming something bad happened to her and that this was a protective instinct on her part.) I tried a lot of creative solutions for getting to be active while growing up. Maybe my most successful was that I managed to be on my high school’s *badminton* team! For all four years!! And we were good, too! I grew up in the US, where so few schools have teams that one of our rival schools was a feeder for the US Olympic team! My only curse is that I’m now too good at badminton to be up for the American backyard version, but I don’t have enough experience to keep up with friends who grew up in places where it’s a big deal sport.
But! I remember dreaming of wearing a team uniform. My little ninth grade self wanted nothing more than that rite of passage/validation. And you’d better believe I still have the mesh uniform shorts sitting in a box somewhere, twenty years later.