Sports Day

One of the tasks I was set when I arrived at CCCD was to try to organise some kind of Sports Day-type event before the kids broke up for the summer. It was acknowledged that there might be a few hurdles I'd have to get over in making this happen, one being that finding time to squeeze it in wouldn't be easy what with exams, preparations for graduation, school trips and various other things in the genral wind down to school closing, the other being that the teachers probably wouldn't be able to lend much of a hand as their priorities were getting all the end-of-year reports and marking finished in time.



Paris shows off her artistic side

 Nonetheless, Miss Cilda was keen that something should happen, and after advising me that my original plan for a full day split into younger kids in the morning and older students in the afternoon was probably a bit ambitious, we decided I should focus on an afternoon during the final week of term, settling in the end on the Tuesday. The other challenge I was set was to try and think of activities that would be a bit different, particulalry for the younger ones, as they had already had a traditional sports day earlier in the year with egg-and-spoon races, three-legged sprints etc. As all the students were split into three houses, red, orange and purple, I decided some kind of team competition along these lines would work best, and not knowing how much help I might get, I only wanted to run one event at a time. So the final plan was to have a team 'soft-putt' (shot-putt with large softballs), skittles (ten-pin bowling with half-filled pop bottles and soft balls) and rounders competition for the younger kids, followed by five-a-side football for the older boys and then volleyball for the girls. Sorted.

As it turned out, a great big group of 20-odd volunteers turned up from Florida at the weekend, many of them keen to get involved in sporting activities with the kids, so I would have all the help I would need. Knowing I had enough help at hand, I started to wonder if it might have worked best to run different activities at the same seeing as we only had three hours to play with. But at two days notice, I didn't really fancy re-working what was a pretty straightforward plan (not to mention re-doing the posters) into something much more prone to go disasterously wrong, especially as I didn't really have much of an idea how to organise an effective sports day and was pretty much going on guesswork.



Playing field pre-strim

 So Tuesday came around and I was feeling pretty nervous - I really wanted things to run smoothly and give the kids an afternoon they'd really remember. The first job, however, was finishing mowing the playing field, which had been four-fifths done by some of the boys over the previous ten days using a hand mower and strimmer (the field is the about one-and-a-half times bigger than a typical football pitch and the grass had been allowed to grow seriously long). As usual, this was a job I probably should have done earlier, i.e. at the weekend when I had plenty of time. The other thing I didn't realise was that the mower had broken, which was why the boys had started the laborious job of strimming the half of the field that hadn't been mown yet. I was in for a busy morning.

Things didn't start too well when the strimmer kept cutting out as soon as I got it started. After 15 minutes of fruitlessly begging the stupid thing to work, I finally trudged back up the hill with my tail between my legs to seek advice (me and machines are rarely a good mix). Monty, one of the visitors from Florida who'd been at the school before and had used said strimmer successfully, gave me another demonstration and it turned out I had been flooding the engine by being too heavy on the throttle (not much change there, then). Armed with this new piece of insight, I returned to the field and, lo and behold, I got it working. It wasn't actually too bad going, if tediously slow because of the grass, and in a coupld of hours I got about half of what needed cutting done, enough for a largish five-a-side football pitch and plenty of room for the other games as well. The hardest part was the fact that the constant vibrations made my hands sieze up into aching claws that took a good couple of minutes of flexing to return to normal once I'd finished, and still tingled for a fair while after that. I have a new-found empathy for anyone suffering from VWF.



Kasa in action

 A couple of hours labouring in the sun was enough to leave me flagging, but I didn't have time to feel tired - by the time I collected all the gear I needed together, drew up score cards and ate lunch, it was 2pm and time to get started. The lower school quickly gathered on the playground with Miss Crane accompaying, and as Miss Crane is also deaf I had reason straight away to be thankful for the American group being here, especially Tia and Sam who can sign and were therefore responsible for passing on instructions. The first task was to organise the group into their house colours, which took a good ten minutes - Britney, for example, didn't want to go in the purple line and wanted to be red for the day, while other kids seemed to see the process of lining up as an excuse to have a good argument about who stood in front of who etc.
After finally getting it all sorted between about six of us, it was time to head down onto the field for the first event, Soft Putt. Having now worked out that they were playing in their house teams, the kids actually lined up again pretty well while the rules were explained to them - one player from each team would step up at a time to compete in three's, having two attempts to chuck the softball as far as they can, the furthest winning three points for their team, second two points, and third one point. For the second time I had reason to be grateful for the help of the American group - it took one person per team to stop all chaos breaking lose in terms of kids pushing in front of eachother and throwing balls at random instead of waiting for their turn, and three to mark out the distance of throws, while I tried to keep score and order by indicating when throws were to be taken. Having just one event at a time started to look like a good idea after all.



Moesha launches one



I had already anticipated a potential issue with this game - with a group of kids ranging in age from 4 to 11, matching like-with-like ability was not going to be easy, with, for example, one team (purple) having the majority of the younger girls while orange seemed to have more than their fair share of bigger, stronger boys. As it turned out, the competition ended up being pretty even and went down to the wire. At first, my fears for the purple team seemed to be realised as their younger girls lost several of the early rounds while boys on the red and orange team slugged it out for the big points, oranges coming out on top as expected. But things began to turn about half way through - purples, perhaps through a stroke of tactical genius, had left their-biggest hitters to last, while reds and oranges began to ran out of steam.



The turning point came three rounds from the end when reds and oranges both had players disqualified and awarded nil points for abandoning the game before they had taken their second throws to go running across the field to look for a type of beetle they are all obsessed with which, when captured, makes a rattling noise when you rub its belly. Both teams had possibly already lost focus on the competition a couple of rounds earlier when a scuffle broke out between the two camps over whose line started where - this latest indiscretion handed purples their second consecutive three points and, with reds now effectively out of the contest, it was left to oranges and purples to slug it out.

With Moesha, who had already impressed me over the past week with her cricketing skills, having secured a third successive win for the purples, it all came down to the last round - a win for oranges would be enough to secure victory, while a win for purples and anything less than second for oranges would hand purples the win. However, with oranges having lost their last player and Alice nominating herself to take his place, it seemed purples were on course for victory, as they had proven their tactical nouse again by leaving Dwight til last, a natural sportsman who easily competes with the older boys at football and cricket.



Me and Dwight



It wasn't, however, going to be that simple. Rawayne, an older boy who had only started at CCCD earlier this year with no language whatsoever, signed or spoken, was last man for reds. All I'd seen of Rawayne so far when it came to sports was a mixture of extreme shyness and frustration when he didn't always get his own way, and I therefore have to admit that, despite his obvious physical advantage over many of the younger boys, I was surprised and delighted when he launched his first effort way over the length of the field and into the cow field beyond. We had a game on.

Needing the three points to pip oranges to the post, Dwight was suddenly under pressure. With all eyes on him, he produced a visibly titanic effort to fire a monster first throw of his own, just beating Rawayne's by perhaps a yard to hand the advantage back to his team. In reply, Rawayne didn't quite get his technique right on his second throw - probably straining too hard for distance, he instead sent his reply veering off slightly to the right, falling just short of the the fence into the cow field. Purples had come from nowhere to win by a point.

I hadn't factored on soft-putt taking quite so long, and all of a sudden it was 3pm and we still had two events to go - it didn't look like rounders (which had become T-ball thanks to some kit the Americans had brought) was going to happen. Not to be helped, we pressed on with skittles, turning the concrete cricket pitch into a temporary mini-bowling alley. The game was going to work by having each member of the three teams taking one turn (i.e. two bowls) to knock down as many of the ten skittles as probably, with scoring as per 10-pin bowling. To hurry things up a bit, we decided to do it a team at a time rather than in three's. Oranges went first, and maybe it was the narrow defeat they'd snatched from the jaws of victory in soft-putt playing on their minds, or maybe it was the pressure of going first, but they didn't live up to expectations, managing only a below-par team total of 17.

Purples were up next, and their go followed the same pattern as soft-putt - after a poor start, scoring just four points after five rounds, they finished strongly, some impressive scoring towards the end guiding them to a potential winning total of 35. So it was all on reds to transform their fortunes from the soft-putt and beat orange into second place in the competition overall (first and guaranteed second at least meant purple had already won over the two events) by winning the skittles. Things didn't get off to a promising start - they didn't score a point until the fifth round. Things picked up significantly after that though, and some steady scoring saw them ease past the oranges total of 17. However, with just one go remaining, they had managed to score just 24, still 11 behind purples, and meaning their last player would have to do what no one had managed so far and knock down all ten pins to have a chance of winning. And then up stepped Rawayne. Not to be outdone again following his near-miss in the soft-putt, he stepped up to the line like a man with a purpose, steadied himself, took aim, and bowled - bullet-straight, with plenty of power behind it, the ball fair slammed into the skittles, sending bottles scattering in all directions. STRIKE!! Needing only one more to wrap up victory from his remaining two bowls, he knocked down a one and a three to see his team finish on 41, leapfrogging oranges into second in the process.

Already feeling a bit guilty at stopping the younger kids' fun a game early, my mood wasn't helped by the fact that, come 3.30pm when they'd all been told to turn up for the football tournament, none of the older boys were anywhere to be seen. After two or three tours round the school, I eventually rounded up enough, plus Mr Lewis' son Ryan and Monty, Ryan, April and Sam from the American group, to at least have a game, although the tournament idea had to be abandoned due to time and lack of numbers. It also meant I had to play, which I was hoping I wouldn't have to coz by this stage I was knackered. In the end it turned into a pretty good game of 8-a-side, a few of the Jamaican lads taking it seriously enough to don full kit including boots, while others, including April (who turned out to be pretty good) had to struggle on barefoot or in flip-flops. I have to hold my hands up and take some of the blame for my teams eventual demise, however - 4-3 up with just five minutes remaining, with me playing in goal, I completely forgot about the no-handling-from-goalkeepers rule we were playing, instinctively putting up a hand when the ball was blasted at me face-wards. Despite my protests that I was just protecting myself and trying to save myself having to run for the ball as it sailed wildly over the bar, the opposition were having none of it and insisted on a penalty. Needless to say, they scored, and then went and grabbed a late winner with the last kick of the game. Damn.



Chillin with Damien and Moesha

 Althought the football didn't go exactly to plan, at least we had a decent game in the end, which was infinitely better than the complete failure that turned out to be the girl's volleygirl competition. In typical fashion, the night before a big group of them had been out playing, and I was confident the tournament would be a big hit, telling as many of them as I could to meet on the court at 4.30pm the next day. But did they? Did they heck. I'm quickly learning the older girls' approach to sport is pretty simple - a bit like whimsical sheep, they act as a group and do what they want when they want, and you might as well forget about trying to round them all up when the group consensus is against you. To be honest, by this time I was too tired to care much anyway. I rightly suspected they might suddenly all show an interest after supper, but by that time I was well past organising anything, so I just handed them the ball and let them get on with it. My work for the day was well and truly done.