SPORT
Overview 2020-2021 This has been a year like no other and one that nobody expected. With the ongoing challenges of Covid-19, we were unable to educate our students through sport, take fixtures for the College or run training sessions. On a personal level we were unable to play for our own sports teams, we could not go and see live sport with our family and friends, or even watch our beloved teams playing on the TV. All the things that we get so much joy from were cancelled. When lockdown returned in Lent term, we had a big job to do as a department – keep our community active. We talk every day to students and staff about the benefits of sport and physical activity so now, more than ever, we had to continue to do this and make the most of the situation we were presented with. Ensuring that we kept our students, parents and staff active was our main priority. We wanted to do this in a way that meant anybody, irrelevant of circumstance, could access some sort of sport or activity. We therefore decided that during our curriculum lessons, we would focus on strength and conditioning; something that every student could engage with and benefit from, with a focus on staying healthy. It also meant that for our club or competitive athletes, they were still developing and challenging themselves physically – something that would be extremely important to ensure that they would return to competitive sport almost 18 months later, having made some physical progress. We managed a full six-week block of this, looking at
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various different fundamental movement patterns and kept this engaging by integrating fitness challenges and high energy workouts that really challenged our students. We also incorporated some science into our lessons, looking at various different health and skill-related fitness components during subsequent lockdowns. Each week would have a theme, such as strength, coordination or speed, and lessons would be tailored around each of those, with fun ‘beat the teacher’ challenges included. Social media also became a big part of our day – everything that we did was posted online to keep our community engaged. We produced a series of ‘Life of a Student Athlete’ videos, a 15-minute-long video with inspirational messages from athletes all over the world, as well as running a virtual Strava competition which saw the College community collectively walk, run or cycle over 12,000 km. Students, parents and staff all engaged extremely well, and we were proud of everyone’s efforts in really difficult times. Upon returning to the College, we were presented with a number of unexpected
