Oh When The Saints! Making History in Sport.

Oh when the Saints, Go marching in. History has been made with our Secondary HRIS team winning the HRIS athletics carnival, resulting in a promotion to Division I for the 2019 Secondary Athletics Carnival. All of our athletes were fantastic! We had a number of students filling in the gaps left by athletes who were unable to attend the carnival and four extraordinary athletes who all competed in multiple age groups above their own. This is a fantastic result for our College, with six Age Champions and nine Age Pennants won (pennants are awarded by adding all athletes points in that age group to determine the school with the highest points) and our team winning by over 700 points!

Our athletes worked hard to achieve this result by training and giving up lunch times, afternoons and two sessions during their school holidays to stack success. Our athletes are building our culture around 'The Saints Way of Sportsmanship, Competitiveness, Appreciation, Determination and Camaraderie' and our team displayed that in everything they did throughout the day.

Our athletes showed great sportsmanship by shaking their competitors hands and the way in which they honoured the successes of all athletes from our school and really supported our team when we achieved success; it was testament to the attitude of our team. The way in which students committed to team meetings and gained an understanding of how the points system worked and the way that they then applied this. You could observe the outstanding determination from our athletes as they ran through the finish line - thus applying what we had talked about in regards to the execution of their performances.

What made me proud as Head of Sport was to see the athletes take what we had talked about and tangibly apply this to our goals. There were so many highlights that I witnessed on the day, from observing students who competed well above their own age, to athletes who didn’t miss a training session then go out and win their event, to watching the 800 metre race and where we saw athletes push from fourth place to first. The effort to take another place or work overtime to hold off another athlete from overtaking them was inspirational. We took the words we spoke about in meetings and applied them to our performance. To watch the outstanding performances from our athletes, time and time again, made me prouder then I could ever say.

Ninety-three athletes, five student helpers and three team photographers.

One dream, One goal, One heartbeat.

Dan Gardner

Head of Sport