Students meet Olympic Silver Medalist

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Created: Thursday, 15 December 2011 15:34

Written by Super User

On Friday 29^th June, myself and Lucy Whitfield were asked to represent the college alongside Mr Coles at an Olympic and school sport conference at Loughborough University. The day started with an introduction from one of the lecturers at the university, outlining what we would be doing over the course of the day and about what Loughborough University was doing to support the Olympics.  

The 1st presentation we had was from Gaynor Nash, who spoke about why the Olympics is so inspiring to so many people, and encouraged us all to get involved in the Olympics in some capacity.

After this presentation, we were told to break off into groups with pupils from other schools and to design a presentation about why school sport was important and what could be done to improve it. We then had to present this to the head teachers, so that they knew what needed to happen in schools to make school sport more appealing to everyone in the college.

During our lunch, we were treated to a badminton exhibition from former Olympic silver medallist and world champion Nathan Robertson.  Alongside Nathan were future Olympian Sam Ward and the badminton coach for England, Andy Wood. They were asked questions on what it took to be an Olympian and what they did to prepare mentally for a big match. This involved having life-sized cut-outs of their opponents on the other side of the court, and hitting shuttlecocks at them so that they were not scared of them!

After lunch, myself and Lucy were taken on a campus tour of the facilities at the university, with most being of an Olympic standard. On the way around the facilities we were given a taster lecture on what it was like in the life of a student, which was very informative.

This concluded our day, with ideas in all of our minds of how we could develop school sport, which will benefit the college in the future.

Dan Archer (Year 12)