("A strong mind in a nerdy body", from the Latin, five years of which also contributes to my nerd cred.)
There's this stereotype that the really brainy kids have some difficulty moving around the physical world successfully. Sometimes it holds true, I am sad to report.
In junior high, my physical education grades (Bs, generally) routinely kept me off the highest tier of the honor roll. In high school, though, I managed to earn varsity letters:
for Math Team, Chemistry Team, and Quiz Bowl. (They looked darn good sewn over the pockets of my cardigan-style letter sweater, though.)
My senior year of high school I torqued my knee pretty badly by being thrown into a swimming pool.
Finally, when I was a college student, I got down to business and started playing a real intellectual's sport: ultimate frisbee. Needless to say, I took it up at math camp (where I taught for five summers).
And, more than once, I have fallen up a flight of stairs. It still hurts, but you don't pick up quite as much speed as falling down a flight of stairs.
Janet, watch out when you call it ultimate frisbee. Frisbee is a brand name and registered trademark of Wham-O Inc. Real ultimate players use the Discraft Ultra-star 175.
In case you're wondering how one 175 gram piece of plastic could differ from another 175 gram piece of plastic, well, they do. The lip on a wham-o frisbee just doesn't feel right (it's sharp and hard).
And don't you get A's just for suiting up for PE? Did they actually grade you on how fast you ran, how high you jumped, and how well you played sports?
At math camp, we actually used a Wham-O Frisbee (and we might have used a 165 for games -- 175 for practice, though). It was, however, the 1980s.
Grades in gym were always contingent upon participation and achievement. By high school, though, they stopped counting for the honor roll (at least, I think they stopped counting ...).
I'm actually fairly athletic, in a song/dance group and was a cheerleader in HS. Does that diminish my nerd cred? (I was also in the marching band, quiz bowl and yearbook editor, if that makes up for the coordination :) )
Your high school had a chemistry team? I am sooooooo jealous.
My middle school and my high school had math team, physics team, chemistry team and biology team and I was a memeber of all of them every year!
On the other hand, I was always lousy at team sports, so I represented the school at 1/2mile and 1mile cross-country running (I was damned fast at the time) and generally did my sports outside of school - karate (black belt, state champion etc.) and equestrian sports (show jumping).
Reading stuff like this make me grateful for my British education where, fortunately, at my school, being bad at sport didn't seem to matter.
Being told to remove my spectacles before playing probably didn't help either. Apparently breaking them was more serious than me hurting myself. I stopped wearing them in my midteens (complicated story) and did improve at sport at about the same time. I was also allowed to chose which sports to play.
We didn't have Chemistry or other discipline teams either - I'm not competitive so I don't think I would have enjoyed being part of them.
If you can get it, I recommend an ancient book called, "Genius and Stupidity." It's the PhD thesis written by Lewis Terman (the guy who followed supposedly very bright kids through their lives trying to prove that very bright kids really are normal, and not freaks.
Back when Terman was a kid parents didn't want a genius child, it was seen as a handicap.
Anyway, it's an interesting look at genius kids in 1907. There are some excerpts here:
http://autismdiva.blogspot.com/2006/01/boy-trouble.html
I think you'll find it interesting the correlation between "brains" and poor coordination issues.