What would fix it would be what they started doing from Year 10, but should do from Year 7 up - offer a wide choice of 6-7 different activities each term. It'd always have the popular ones for those good at them who did just want to do those - rugby, cricket, hockey etc (and those should be offered regardless of gender), but would also offer a load of different stuff like swimming, going to a local gym (an old fashioned "pumping iron" place, they didn't have modern ones in the 90s), tennis, badminton etc.
We had exactly this. From memory, in Year 7:
Outdoors: rugby, football, tennis, athletics
Indoors: basketball, cricket, volleyball, gymnastics
The teachers were strict on *trying*, but not in ability. They expected you to be tired afterwards, and they didn't tolerate standing around doing anything. Yet they didn't place any emphasis on individual performance, and if someone excelled in team sports, they were limited in some way to avoid them dominating games. I was the fastest runner by a considerable way in my class, so in rugby, I had to pass the ball after 10 metres if we were playing a game.
What I really enjoyed was that the teachers took time to personalise the education. For instance, I was a very strong 1500m runner. Our PE teacher knew this, and so I started later than others. The nice thing was that he took into account my PB, so he expected me to catch whoever was first by the end of the final lap. It gave me motivation, yet it gave others a chance to beat me over that distance as well.
There was no bullying in our PE classes as a result, because the better ones were handicapped in various ways. For instance, a friend of mine was a great basketball player. He was therefore banned from shooting within the 3 point arc, which forced him to play as a team player and not as an individual. The same went in football, where the better players were limited to their own half.
I still remember attending a football competition with some kids from the school I worked in, and I assumed one kid was big, slow and clumsy. He didn't do much running, but what surprised me was just how hard he could kick a ball. It turned out that while he couldn't pass or dribble with the ball, he had an extraordinary talent for kicking a ball hard. He was only taken along to make up numbers, but after the first free kick, it became apparent that he was a deadly weapon for us. One notable part of the competition involved him taking a free kick from just outside the box. The kids on the other team were laughing at him for being the useless fat kid, so he steps up with the ball. He aimed that ball straight at one of the smirking kids, and the ball went straight off their face. The kid went down like a tonne of bricks, and our team had an easy tap-in for a goal. The referee tried to call the goal off, but I collared him and told him that he had no grounds to stop the game. The victim went off the pitch hurt, and it's hard to say that he didn't deserve it.
He ended up scoring several goals that weekend, because once the other teams saw how hard he could kick the ball, they wanted nothing to do with him. All it took was the will to let him play, and we had a secret weapon for the next few years.
