I swear I’m not one of those death-to-organized-sports types. I give sincere shout-outs to all my teammates and coaches who tolerated me on basketball and track.

As my time at this fine institution comes to an end, however, I want to leave those of you thinking about playing PHS sports for the sake of PE credit with these last words: seriously consider taking PE instead.

I’ve seen too many people waste months of their lives on sports they don’t want to be playing.

When I was on track as a sophomore, I observed and talked to the people who would rather have been doing something else.

They definitely weren’t doing their teammates a favor, and it was painful to watch the effect the time commitment had on them. The confident musician retreated into his seat on the bus rides to meets, the cartoonist lost fun time for run time.

These people lost around 15 hours a week, for three or four months a year. In that time, they could have learned to play an instrument, prepared an entire mock trial case, read “The Satanic Verses”— anything at all. The sheer amount of time needed for sports requires that the decision can’t be made lightly.

Before you begin to weigh your options more carefully, allow me to turn your attention to the beauties of upper division PE. Below are the top five reasons you can live with taking PE, and perhaps even enjoy it:

1. It takes so much less time. PE is four hours a week. Sports are around three times that amount.

2.It’s not freshman year PE, and definitely not middle school PE. Everyone knows how to manage their BO now. There are also fewer students enrolled, so locker rooms can be tranquil havens of privacy, if not sanctuaries with great acoustics for juicy gossip sessions.

3. You’ll never have to carve out time to exercise. I almost shriveled up and blew away first semester of junior year because I could never bring myself to get some exercise. When I joined PE second semester, I never had to worry about dragging myself out of bed at 6:15 a.m. to run on my own.

4. Mr. Peters is a devoted and legitimate PE teacher. He had a martial arts teacher visit to teach us self-defense. He teaches us about anatomy in the weight room. He leads mindfulness and meditation exercises. In short, he genuinely guides us through physical exercise as well as a well-rounded Physical Education.

5. You can befriend people you never would’ve gotten a chance to. More than 65 percent of the school participates in sports, according to the PHS school profile. Another chunk of the school does dance and extracurricular sports at a nationally ranked level. That means it is really hard to make friends with people who don’t fall into those categories, statistically speaking. Although I didn’t personally know a single person in my class, I formed surprisingly meaningful and sweet friendships with almost half of my class. I met someone who has a passion for the color yellow, someone who has traveled to almost every country you could name, someone who is so candid that everything he says makes me want to laugh, or cry — but not in a mean way.

I’m beyond grateful for my time in PE, but I can’t honestly say I had the foresight to actively choose it. I didn’t really have a choice but to take it, you see.

Because of the time commitment, my previous plans to do track second semester of junior year had proven completely unrealistic as the year went by, so Ms. Carlson and I had to get creative with how I was going to graduate.

Just those two letters brought back memories of the hot sun beating down on me as I wheezed through the mile in my awkwardly fitted shorts.

Still worse was putting on normal clothes afterwards and trekking to class with my body still sticky from sweat.

There’s no denying that these moments absolutely do happen in upper division PE, but I promise that’s the worst it gets. Even the mile becomes easier. Remember: if you open your mind, you could open up your life to not only more freedom, but also new relationships and even a new body. You’d better take advantage of the opportunity to flaunt those flattering shorts while they’re still in style.