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.
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