These are our worst childhood sports nightmares. What’s yours?

We all love watching sports, and most if not all of us enjoy or have enjoyed playing sports at one point. For many of us, our defining sports moments came as children, perhaps in Little League or just playing with our friends.

But not all sports memories are great, and we weren’t always carried off the field/court as champions. Sometimes, what sticks with us even decades later was quite painful, perhaps funny, and almost certainly embarrassing on some level.

Here are our childhood sports nightmares. Please enjoy our youthful trauma for your amusement.

Posterized

It was in eighth or ninth grade, and one day we found an elementary school where we could play some pickup basketball. This was mostly a mix of good friends and friendly acquaintances. There were no strangers here. My best friend Scott, who was a good four inches shorter than me, ended up on the opposing team for one of the games.

Scott was naturally a point guard, a tough-as-nails Rod Strickland type, if I had to pin an NBA comp on him. I was slow and mostly confined to the low post, though I had a surprisingly good outside shot for a time. None of that mattered on this day.

I found myself pedaling back, defending on a fast break, with Scott barreling towards me. I was concerned with who he might pass to, and committed the sin of failing to stop the ball. Before I knew it, I was much too close to the basket and Scott was determined to finish with a bucket. He jumped toward me, and I didn’t think much of it, other than wondering how I might block his layup, which up until this moment was the pinnacle of our finishing options.

But then a funny thing happened. Scott never stopped going up. His knee hit my chest at roughly the same time I remembered we were playing on eight-foot rims, and even that stunning realization could not have prepared me for the thunderous dunk he unleashed on me. It was almost exactly like that Chambers dunk, at least in my mind.

I texted Scott — we are still friends, have been since kindergarten — to ask him if he remembered this dunk, which of course he did.

“LOL, Tom Chambers as a Sun,” Scott said. “If I was more graceful/athletic it could have been like [James] Worthy.”

From my vantage point, under him, Scott looked graceful enough to me.

This was total humiliation. Luckily I was among mostly friends, and since my best friend Scott was the one who posterized me, I didn’t need to immediately retire, not only from basketball but from public life.

— Eric Stephen

Maximum Overdrive

In my hometown of Port Jervis, New York, we had this thing called “pitching machine baseball,” which was played after tee-ball and before free-pitch baseball. Essentially, the coaches would drag on to the mound one of those pitching machines with the giant rubber wheel, like this one:

JUGS Sports via Amazon.com

You’ll notice a couple of things about this beast. One is that it’s a high-powered device that requires being plugged in, which usually meant running a live extension cable across the first base line in order to reach the mound. Why not run it from behind home plate instead of across a major running path? I don’t know; why use it at all? You’re already asking the wrong questions.

You’ll also notice the giant, exposed rubber wheel that’s used to propel the ball at somewhere north of 60 mph. That’s not usually an issue when this thing is behind some sort of protective net, but perhaps you’re putting together by now that such a thing didn’t exist for yours truly.

You see, in “pitching machine,” while the coach operated the machine on the mound, there was still a kid who played as pitcher to make plays on the ball, end the play and then hand the ball to the coach. And then just … stand there I guess? Right next to this clear and present danger.

And so, after the third time a batter hit a line drive straight into the exposed wheel and ricocheted it into my cheek bone, I put down my glove, said “Gentlemen, thank you very much,” and never played another game of baseball in my life.

— Ryan Simmons

Beanball

I was a decent Little League ball player, although one could say my baseball career peaked around 8 years old. One excuse for why things might have gone south? How about our own coach regularly beaning us!

Where I lived, kids started with Tee Ball, then moved on to coach pitch, then on to kids pitching. In the coach pitch leagues, a coach pitched to his own team (with the opposing team placing a player next to him to field the position). We had coaches rotate pitching, and one of the coaches had a wild streak and managed to regularly bean kids when he was up there. And given that it was a coach pitching to his own team, you didn’t get to take your base. The coach was not throwing top speed by any means, but when you’re eight years old, you remember that kind of thing!

— David Fucillo

A scathing review

I’m fairly sure I’ve told this story on SB Nation before, but reliving your childhood traumas is at least [checks] 95 percent of the point of the internet. So let’s do it again.

In my early teens, before I could even dream of a growth spurt, my dad took me to almost all of my soccer matches. I’m not going to tell you that I lit the world on fire, but I was good for the level I was playing, especially when you take into account that I had an almost supernatural aversion to running (I still have this).

One day my mother took me instead. Most of our games were on grass, but this time we ended up playing on what was essentially concrete painted green. I was at left back. With nothing to slow the ball down, the game became about speed, and I was not at all equipped to deal with speed. My team lost, 2-0, and I got absolutely torched on one of the goals.

When I got back in the car for the 20-minute ride home, my mother said, “I don’t understand why your dad told me you were good.” The rest was awkward silence.

— Graham MacAree

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