Our year in sport
The sports program at Wesley College provides students with a range of opportunities to pursue their interests in sport, embrace challenges and learn from experience. This year, Wesley’s top teams have experienced great success in sports from cross country to gymnastics and hockey.
A winning season
Wesley Sport has had a very successful year, securing two APS Premierships in racquet sports in the Summer season. Both the Girls First Tennis team and the Girls First Badminton team took out their respective Premierships.
Our Boys Gymnastics Premiers claimed the Victorian Interschools Men’s artistic championship trophy for the sixth year running.
In a hard-fought season, members of the Table Tennis team also played brilliantly, losing to eventual Premiers, Haileybury, in a tough final match.
The Winter season saw Wesley win four Premierships from a possible 11.
The Girls Cross Country team finished the season undefeated for an incredible eighth Premiership in a row. The Boys Cross Country team secured the Premiership for the fourth year in a row, shared with arch rivals Haileybury and St Kevin’s College.
Undefeated all season, our tenacious Netball Firsts held off Geelong Grammar to take the Premiership in a thriller of a final game, while the Boys Hockey team was so dominant all season it had already secured the Premiership in the penultimate round.
The Girls Soccer team also completed an amazing season, breathing down the necks of the eventual Premiers, Carey, in the final match.
Gritty performances from members of our Girls and Boys Athletics squads secured third place for both in the APS Athletics Final.
Setting and achieving goals through sport
Among the many curricular and cocurricular programs at Wesley, our sports program is a clear example of a true education that enables our students to know, to do, to live with and to be.
The compulsory sports program prepares our students for the realities of life. It involves competition and the inevitability, at some point, that our students are going to be on the losing side. Our students learn to cope with the emotion of losing as well as winning, and how to use these emotions to motivate their efforts to improve. These lessons from sport are crucial to learning and should be embraced.
Sporting success, but also failure, in 2019 have helped our students to set achievable goals and identify appropriate next steps. When students understand how to set and achieve goals, and the link between the discipline and hard work of training and performance, they can also transfer this to their studies.
On every Saturday morning of competition during 2019, staff, coaches, students and their parents saw how the week’s work at training sessions played out in competition on sporting fields, rowing courses, sports halls and courts, pools, tracks and mud-spattering cross-country trails across Melbourne and beyond as part of the APS/AGSV sporting seasons.
We and our students have seen many successes, sometimes a winning result but sometimes amazing progress that might not have been reflected on the scoreboard. We have seen personal and team improvement, skill development, effort, enthusiasm and team work: in a word, learning.
Our sports program in 2019 has given our students opportunities to think strategically, and adapt tactically, practising strategies and tactics in an environment of ‘safe failure’. Best of all, the sports program has enabled our students to learn by doing, and to adapt and apply their sporting experiences to other aspects of their learning and their lives.
These successes have been deservedly celebrated and every Premiership student is to be congratulated, but so too is every student, and the staff and coaches who have committed their time, energy and talent to the sports program. So, too, we must thank all the parents who ensure every student is ready, willing and able to play, whether home or away and sometimes very far away, during our three sports seasons in 2019.
