From The Principal

Tena koutou katoa. Nga mihi atawhai nui.

Engage. Enjoy. Excel. These are the words that underpin our Sports Department Strategic plan. And this department continues to puts these words into action, despite the many obstacles that have been thrown at us all with these COVID lockdowns.

Term 1 was a hugely busy Term for Sports, with everything being squashed into a limited time frame. Sports continued to have strong engagement and participation levels.

The focus was on the engagement of students new to school in 2021 with planned activities being run each lunchtime for the first two weeks of the Term. These were delivered by the Sports Council students with up to 100 students in attendance each day. During the Term 1 lockdown period, our Heads of Sport were using Instagram to promote active sessions and challenges on a daily basis, and to stay connected with our student population.

Term 2 ran without any disruptions to competitions. The Sports Department ran a very successful student coach workshop in conjunction with Harbour Sport, with over 45 of our student coaches in attendance at the two hour session. The Sports Council again ran a Friday activity each week and managed to change it up with a 6 week House competition. This included new types of activities such as 2 square, futsal, 3*3 basketball and indoor tennis. It was a hugely successful initiative and attracted students who hadn’t been involved before, to have a go.

The Sports Council did a profile interview with all our core sports captains which was communicated across multiple media platforms – the Sports Council Instagram and Facebook. We have also organised a captains’ board and Sports Council photo boards to be on display in the gym foyer, and added in new photo boards to promote our summer and winter sports.

Caitlin O’Reilly and Katie Linstrom represented Carmel College at the Halberg awards. We had four Year 11 students also involved in a Halberg Māori leadership programme and the feedback from all these girls is that it was hugely beneficial.

We continue to maintain our numbers across all sports. The priority remains that we continue to provide opportunities for all our students either via organised sport or social sport.

And, the end of the sporting year was celebrated via a virtual presentation – see the video on the Sports Awards page in this newsletter.

A very HUGE thank you to Annie and Claire who continue to role model engagement, enjoyment and how to excel in all sports.