Three festivals in one, not easy but a real highlight

 My sporting highlight of the weekend just gone by? ……… Well, the World Cup final, obviously, but apart from that, it’s got to be the four days I spent at St David’s covering their three simultaneous sports festivals, basketball, cricket and water polo.

It was the independent schools’ half term break – a custom those schools have of giving everyone a weekend off in the middle of all their frantic activity. And then, in true teacher-style, they fill it with even more frantic activity and make those running it work even harder in their break than during their time on duty.

They do it for the kids, of course, although there’s a marketing spin-off for the school, I guess. There certainly should be. It takes considerable organisational prowess to have all those games played on time, particularly at this time of the year when the weather is always a factor. And there is plenty of hard work going on behind the scenes, I sat in the media office and saw a fair part of it.

The real stars were outside though, the coaches, the referees and the boys.

Randomly, some highlights making the whole thing a highlight, included:

The ongoing Michael Mount basketball success story. The Montessori school made both finals of the Inanda Hoops tournament, their under-15s won it and their under-18s came close. The Dubravka Lunnemann legend continues. She’s an ex-parent who originally hails from Serbia who got the school on the basketball map and although she’s older now and takes a bit of a back seat, she was there with the teams at their games and I watched how the players gave her their absolute attention whenever she had something to say to them.

Putting under-12 water polo players into an international size water polo pool and telling them to swim. It’s a long way from goal to goal in a pool like that, and they are little guys. I just loved watching the effort they put in. They are going to be far better at the game for the experience they got this weekend.

The ongoing innovative thinking of Dave Nosworthy. The St David’s director of cricket has coached the game at very high levels, yet there he was, designing a T10 tournament aimed at giving 10 and 11 year-olds a fun-filled, action-packed weekend. The idea was that they should fall in love with the game and make it their choice as they get older. It was in stark contrast to his other innovation – the two-day festival for U18s, aimed at slowing it down and mastering the art of playing cricket over long periods of time.

The kids who spent the long weekend at St David’s all came away a little better at what they do – that's a real highlight to me.