School Sports – Jump Rope, Dance, Soccer and Archery

It seems that middle schools and high schools in Korea aren’t involved in organized sports. Students are always studying and hardly have time for outside sports unless they have P.E. class, where they learn all types of sports, but never focus on one. But, schools have random sports days or dancing contests. At Jung Ang Girls High School, they had sports day, which involved a jump rope contest, a wave contest and a dancing contest. Last year at Wol-pyung Middle School, they had a soccer tournament for the boys’ classes and a kick ball tournament for the girls’ classes. The students were surprisingly very competitive and excited to play and win. One girls’ class asked me if they could skip my class to practice kick ball! Of course, I let them. Another random ‘sports’ event was the dancing contest. Some groups of girls and boys got together and practiced dances to KPOP songs. After the competition, the Chinese character teacher danced to “Beat it,” by Michael Jackson! Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see this, but from what the students said, it was a sight to see.

One of the best sports at my school is the archery team. Apparently, my middle school is the only middle school in Ulsan to have an archery team. But there are many throughout other cities in Korea. They just built a new archery facility, where the students practice and take breaks. The archery team consists of about six girls and only four of them get to actually compete. They practice hard everyday. During winter break, they practiced everyday for six hours except for Sunday. They’ve had two competitions since I’ve been here. In March, they won first place in all of Korea!!

Click here to see an article about the archery team (good luck, it’s in Korean)