Sport in secondary school?

Richard Hillman

I was posting in the AH Olympic thread about very little choice for kids in school to play different sports that the usual. Most schools focus on football, GAA and Rugby nearly exclusively. I was wondering what sports were available for you to participate in competitively? i.e against different schools

we had

Football (male and female)
Gaelic football (male only)
Golf after 4th year (males)
Basketball (male and female)
Athletics but only shot put and javelin (Male, no female interest)
Cross country (male and female but no training was done)

titan18

I think in my school, it was just GAA(football and hurling) and there was some sort of athletics team, might have just been cross country, and a few track events but not much training was involved. We didn't even have a soccer or rugby team.

It's not like it was a small school either where you could understand that, it's a large Cork City school, 800+ pupils and are probably one of the better GAA schools around.

Luno

I think schools are now opening more options on extra curricular activities to pupils than previous times.

hardCopy

We had:
Rugby
Basketball
Hurling
Soccer
Athletics
Cross Country
Swimming

Rugby was nominally the main sport in the school but we were never able to compete with the rugby schools.
Basketball came in around the time I started and was a favourite of our principal.
Hurling was a favourite of one particular teacher who dislike Gaelic Football, it was also thought that Gaelic Football would eat into the player pool of rugby so Football was banned.
Soccer was grouped into U14, U16, U18 so unless you were decent you only got to play every two years and it seemed to have a very short season.
In athletics, the North Leinster's were a big deal every year as all entrants got a day or two off school to attend, we were allowed to enter pretty much any discipline we wanted (except for a last minute change to disallow Pole-Vault as our vaulter had never even seen a pole up close) but the preparation was never great and the team was often picked based on who looked the fittest from the other sports teams.
Cross Country got a decent bit of attention with training twice a week during lunch time, most lads never really stuck at it as the distances involved became "bleedin massive". It helped that one of our PE teachers was an international Cross Country runner, although outside of one lad who went on to run internationally we weren't great.
We had our own swimming pool (sadly now closed) which was used for PE.

Looking back at it now we really had an awful lot of choice in terms of sport (possibly why we were never great at any one). A crying shame that the school pool was allowed to close.

rainbow kirby

My school had hockey, camogie, Gaelic football and badminton - they also made up athletics/cross-country teams from people who trained wth clubs. All-girls secondary school in south Dublin.

locum-motion

In our school, we had

Rugby
Soccer
Swimming
Basketball
Athletics
Cricket
Tennis

Rugby was the main sport and was basically compulsory up to 4th year. For the first two terms, we had matches virtually every Wed and Sat, 'tog-out' (ie training) Mon, Tue, Thu & Fri. We had 3 teams each at U13, U14 & U15, 2 U16 teams & 4 U18 teams.

There was a soccer team for 5th & 6th years who didn't want to play rugby.

In summer term, the emphasis shifted to Athletics.

Each year had a basketball team.

In these 4, we competed against other schools.

There was also house leagues. The school was divided into 4 houses and there was intramural competition in all of the above list. Exam performance was also counted, as well as things like Debating.

biohaiid

My school had:
Gaelic
Soccer
Basketball (girls only)
Golf
Cross country/Athletics

These had teams that competed, but we had much more sports offered to us during PE.
Some of which we tried included:
Gymnastics
Badminton
Table Tennis
Rugby
Hockey

Although I ditched every PE class I could, I suppose we were quite lucky with our range of sports and excellent facilities.
Maybe a decent PE teacher would have gotten me more involved ..

EDIT: It's a school of 400ish pupils if anyone was wondering.

atilladehun

I'm just wondering about the role of the school in this. Some school take a certain sport seriously and promote that while as you said other sports may happen but there's no training.

The teachers are obviously hired on their History/Science/French duties, not after school sports.

Should they be required to undertake an after school activity? including debating etc but sport is the discussion here.

Should the department issue grants for schools to pay people - teachers/parents/coaches from local clubs to run this.

Just putting it out there.

ecoli

I remember when I started in school we had three runners from my training club (My training partner and me and another girl). There was no athletics in the school but after alot of begging and pleading they allowed us to enter Schools Championships. We were pretty successful.

By time we got to third year we were approached to help out in terms of coaching and started captaining small teams in low key athletics meets. Since I have left they now send full squads for male and female (over 60 athletes) and challenge for school titles (overall).

Moral is that if someone pushes it there is no school which doesn't like the prestige associated with success. Rather than force people with no interest to coach which has an effect on the kids enthusiasm there needs to be greater links with surrounding sports clubs.

This way schools provide feeders to clubs and schools get expertise of coaches in the relevant sports. No cost to the department of education and the clubs increase there membership and helps with talent identification

Smiley Laura

In our school, which is an all girls school, there is:
A soccer team
A Gaelic team
A hurling team
A basket ball team
A badminton team

We are not too bad for a girls school. Oh, and there is an athletics team, of which I am the sole member! The loneliness of the long distance runner...