Today’s event tops off a truly spectacular year for Sport at NAIS Pudong. We have had great improvement and successes across all team sports and age groups. My particular highlights were the U15 FOBISIA Games in Beijing, where our boys and girls football teams showed great determination, skill and perseverance and were duly rewarded. Our swimmers smashed school records in Phuket at the FOBISIA swim meet; the U19 boys and girls football teams were outstanding at the ACAMIS Football tournament in Beijing with truly nerve-wracking final games where the boys came out victors and the girls lost by the slimmest of margins; our young athletes were impressive at the U13 FOBISIA games in Hong Kong, winning a huge swag of medals in the track and field events and reaching amazing heights in the basketball; the long-anticipated victory in the SISAC Netball tournament for our fantastic U19 Netball team, who overcame long-time rivals, Dulwich College, to win the cup.
For our younger students, we’ve seen great progress in the U9 and U11 Rugby teams as well as our U11 Netball team. The coaches have been truly impressed by the ethic and skills displayed this year and we’re looking forward to another fantastic year in 2016-17.
Looking forward to next year, and after many years coaching our Tiger Shark swim teams, Coach Cheryl Philp is moving on. Cheryl had been a great coach and brought out the very best in our swimmers. We wish her all the best for the future.
We are happy to announce our new Multi-Sport swim coach, Aileen Stirling, who is excited to be joining the team. Aileen has represented Scotland in swimming on many occasions and has been coaching for 10 years. She is an STA Level 2 coach who says here motto is “Mind over matter”. No doubt she will continue to build on our squads’ performances.
Of course, we are also delighted that our new Deputy Head of Secondary, Therese Andrews, herself a competitive Masters’ swimmer and Welsh Champion, will be assisting with the development of our Tiger Shark squads, and we’re looking forward to more great things from them in 2016-17.
I am very excited to announce that we are installing flood lights on our main sports field which will allow us to train our school sports teams later into the afternoon and evening. Coupled with this, we are also, in the coming year, setting up a brand new Kangqiao Tigers Sports Club here at NAIS Pudong to compete in the local Shanghai Youth League for football. This will be initially for the U19 age group, but will be extended to include other age groups and other sports as the year progresses.
We are looking to run a later bus service after regular CCA times next year to support our many families living in Jinqiao with school sport, as well as a weekend service. We will have more details of this when we return after the summer break.
So, we’re going into the summer with some great achievements and big plans for next year. I hope all of our young sportspeople have a good rest over the summer, but remember to keep up some of the training and we’ll be hitting the ground running with training and trials for SISAC volleyball, netball and rugby teams beginning on the first Tuesday back.
Mr Noel Wallace
Director of Sport and CCAs