In the First Class Complete Edition (official Cambridge book) there's an example:
None of us (ever ski) before so we had been looking forward forward to it for months.
Naturally I wrote "None of us had ever skied before so we had been looking forward to it for months." But the only right answer, so the book says, is "had ever been skiing".. Why??
To put things into perspective, is is even idiomatic or at least colloquial to say:
"I have never been playing football"?