St Katherine's Sports Awards

On Thursday 8 June the PE department hosted the annual Sports Award Evening.  Mr Cook (Head of PE) tells the story of a memorable evening:

“It is no secret that this is our favourite evening in the school calendar and we are always hugely excited at the opportunity of recognising and rewarding our very best students. We could not be prouder of the students who attended the ceremony, all of whom make such substantial and
unique contributions to the PE faculty at our school.

The pace of daily routine rarely gifts us the opportunity to reflect, recognise and reward those who deserve it and that makes evenings such as this all the more special. We have been overwhelmed by the number of students who have approached their PE and sport with enormous amounts of enjoyment, resilience and dynamism this year. This made it a near impossible task to decide on the final list of nominees for the evening.

We would like to congratulate every single student who received a nomination for an award at this years event.

Our special guests for the evening were Kate Grey, ex-Paralympic athlete now working in sports media and Duncan Game, former UK Sprint Champion and St Katherine’s student.

Kate successfully represented Team GB as a Paralympic swimmer for 10 years before embarking on a career in sports media as a reporter,  commentator and pundit. Kate has had an enormously varied relationship with sport throughout her life and had so many poignant messages to share with us. We are extremely grateful that Kate gave up her time to help us celebrate this evening and were delighted to be joined by such a strong female sporting role model.

Duncan is a former St Katherine’s student and without a doubt one of, if not the most successful sportsperson to have come through the school. Throughout the 80’s Duncan held the title of the fastest boy in the whole of the United Kingdom and achieved numerous local, county and national schoolboy sprint titles. His personal best times for the 100m and 200m are 10.69 and 21.6 respectively. We were hugely grateful to Duncan for giving up his time to come back to share in our celebrations – in actual fact this was his first visit back in 27 years!

STUDENTS RECEIVED NOMINATIONS FOR AWARDS IN 15 CATEGORIES – A SPECIAL EDITION NEWSLETTER CAN BE FOUND ON THE ‘PE AND SPORTS NEWS‘ PAGES.

The history and legacy of the awards is really starting to build amongst our student body and this is really starting to have an impact on the students. The number of times during the evening that we heard students saying ‘that’s mine next year’ was brilliant. The very best competitors raise their levels in response to challenges and adversity and that level of aspiration is exactly what we want from our students.

Our previous winners play such a huge role in raising the standards that current students need to reach in order to receive their nominations. We are really proud of the growing tradition that this event has and it really is true what they say; success breeds success.