Dear Parents, Caregivers and Friends of St Mary’s School,
Well here we are in Week Six of Term Four already. Today a number of our pupils are off representing
the school at the Otago Primary School Sports Association Championships. I’m sure that you join with
me in wishing those pupils good luck.
Success in sport is like success in any field—the harder that you work then the better results that you
achieve.
I recently attended a debrief of Otago representative hockey coaches and managers, At the end of this
meeting Dave Ross the coach of the Southern men’s team (beaten finalists the last two years), raised the
point for debate. “When is the time in sport to move from development to competition?”
His thoughts were high school as the changing point. As soon as you have tournaments, medals, cups
and representative teams, he reasoned the focus goes on winning solely and a huge amount of pressure
is then put on everybody involved but especially the child to win.
The bottom line is sport should be fun enjoyable, challenging and social. Except for a very few outstand-ing athletes, children can not look to a forward career as a professional athlete, quite simply only a tiny
percentage of people achieve this.
Those that do and sustain this success do so because of self motivation, self belief and great work ethic.
The values that we learn through sport are invaluable life skills.
As the great American football coach Vince Lombardi said, “Football is like life—it requires perseverance,
self denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority”.
Have a great week
Mike Brosnahan,
Principal