Confessions of a Tennis-Skirt Boy

Can you believe I still have this fragment, which turned up in a load of old things just the other day? Here typed out in full, to commit to posterity an early bit of writing and an early (but memorable) experience!

Hi, I’m a boy who’s had to play tennis in girls’ tennis whites, including a skirt! It was when I went to visit my cousins who are all girls, they’ve got a tennis court at home and they wanted me to play, but I hadn’t brought any tennis things so they got very giggly and made me wear theirs as I’m the same age and size as my oldest cousin! Even so I think maybe her tennis skirt was too short on me. It felt too short anyway, but maybe that’s because I’m not used to wearing one!

You’re probably wondering if I wore girls’ gym knickers too, well my cousins all have white knickers with frills on for tennis and they wanted me to wear those too but that was going a bit far for me! For one thing I didn’t think I’d be able to stay in them, I get annoyed enough with certain ‘bits’ bouncing about when I’m running in PE even if I’ve got boys’ pants on!

Something else I noticed, I get very fretful playing girls at tennis because they’re usually better than me and so before the game I fidget and scratch my bottom a lot, well in a short skirt I think it’s a bit too easy to get to my underwear because I found myself fiddling with it all the time! When I wasn’t playing and messing around with the hem of my skirt I was twisting my underwear elastic around in my fingers or picking at it or pulling it back down into place behind me when it was riding up. Obviously I’ve seen girls do this last one but never any of the rest. Maybe they’re taught not to fiddle and play with their knickers, unless they’re just more used to wearing skirts, or perhaps it’s that they know they’re better at the game than boys so don’t get as anxious as us in the first place!

Also it’s hard for a boy to find a position to sit down in a tennis skirt without showing your pants because those skirts are so short. When I was sitting on the grass before my game I was actually sitting on my underwear not my skirt, because it wouldn’t all tuck under me. This meant that when I stood up I had to beat the dust and cut bits of grass off the back of my actual pants not my skirt and I felt very silly!

As for the game itself, well, after the first serve I really wished we were playing badminton not tennis! That wouldn’t have been as bad because you get to serve underarm, but serving properly for tennis was embarrassing! Also when you stoop over to receive a serve, people can see your pants if they’re sitting down on your baseline to watch (my other two cousins were!).

I felt silly too losing to my cousin in my skirt, sillier than I would have felt in my shorts. I mean, any boy feels embarrassed and silly when he loses a game to a girl anyway, but you feel a hundred times worse if you to a girl when you’ve got a skirt on.

So as you can already tell, I lost pretty bad! My eldest cousin may be only my age but she’s like a hundred times better at tennis. I’m still trying to decide what was worse – a girl getting the better of me so easily, or my two younger cousins watching her do it! But actually, they must have both seen my underpants while I was rushing round the court trying to keep up, and I guess THAT’s the worst part!