9 Primary Rounders Leaders

St Katherine’s has a really strong tradition of producing great young sports leaders and this year has been no different with current year 10 and 11 cohorts full of fantastic leaders. In recent weeks students from year 9 have been choosing their options and the PE faculty decided to offer a group of year 9 students who have provisionally opted for sport next year, an opportunity to act as sports leaders.

On the morning of Wednesday 24 May the leaders gathered together for some pre-event training in rounders. For some of the students it is a long time since they have played rounders and there are so many different versions of the proper game that schools play that there were quite a few disagreements about the rules! Fortunately Mr Excell and Mr German were on hand in their capacity as North Somerset Primary School Sport specialists to teach the leaders all that they needed to know about the game before the festival.

Zerin AKBAYIR, Danny BENNETT, Will CONROY, Ethan EGGLESTON, Charlie HAYWARD, George HAYWARD, Kaie LAWRENCE, Felix MCGOVERN, Jazzy PITHER, Alfie RENDELL, Lucie ROBERTSHAW, Caitlin SEMPLE, Morgan TILEY, Ruby WEBBER, Henry WELCH, Sam WILLIAMS, Muhammed ZUBAIR

On Thursday 25 May the students apprehensively gathered together to set up, organise and lead the NSSPEA Primary Rounders Festival. All up there were 6 different primary schools that attended; All Saints, Court de Wyck, Golden Valley, Portishead Primary, Fairfield and Wrington. This meant that there were almost 100 primary school students on site in addition to the parents and adults that came with the schools.

On the day our students needed to organise equipment, umpire matches, record scores, and praise & encourage the students and help them to understand the rules and improve their rounders. Teams of 6 looked after a pitch each and they split these jobs up between them. I am absolutely delighted to say that the students did a phenomenal job leading an enormously successful festival. They drew great praise from all of the students and staff that attended and I am hugely proud of the work that they did; especially given that they had never led anything like this before! Immediately after the event I received some lovely feedback about our year 9 leaders from Mr German (North Somerset Primary School Sport Manager).

Once again the students from St Katherine’s proved to be outstanding leaders who were complemented highly by all of the staff from the competing schools; their efforts were even more impressive given that they have yet to start their BTEC course! I do not wish to single any student out as they were all very impressive. I understand that in these times of pressure on examination results it is not always easy to give permission for students to miss lessons, but the positive experience of running events such as this will hopefully stand the students involved in good stead as they begin their BTEC Sport studies.

I am hugely proud of all of the students who put on a fantastic afternoon of sport for so many primary school students.

Well done to you all.

Mr Cook