Written by John McEnhill (Curriculum Coordinator)
Over the last 3 years, competitive sports at YCIS Shanghai have seen a dramatic expansion, both in terms of the number of students taking part and in the number of representative teams. This is due in no small part to the work of our Sports and Co-Curricular Coordinator, Mr. Lennart van Vlerken, who improved our sports program by collecting parent community feedback and finding ways to cooperate with specialists from the different sports’ fields.
This year again, under the watchful eye of Mr. Lennart and our new P.E teacher Mr. David Watson, a great number of children have tried out for various teams at the beginning of the school year. It was a great experience for the children as they could get some initiation into the world of competition. Only a limited number of participants can be selected as there are limited number of spaces. However, the children who were note selected this year, know that having an objective in mind, they can develop their skills by practising and applying again next year!
This expansion of the competitive sports programme would not have happened without the willingness of our parent community to become involved: we now have no less than 17 parents generously giving their time to work with our sports teams after school and at the weekends.
Only last year due began running a swimming programme, and we now have 51 students for this year who will compete in swimming competitions against other schools. YCIS has also played host to development tournaments, where other schools from Shanghai are invited to come and compete with our student athletes. Last year we hosted the YCIS Primary Basketball Tournament and the YCIS Primary Football Tournament for U9 and U11 students, and we will host these tournaments again this year.
The below graphic shows the dramatic increase in the number of student athletes at YCIS over the last few years. We are sure our competitive sports programme will go onto even greater heights over the coming months.
If your child would like to get prepared for next year’s school sports teams, we encourage you to join Multisports’ program. For more information, please contact Mr. Lennart at lennart.vanvlerken@sh.ycef.com.