On Friday we enjoyed the Senior Sports Dinner, brilliantly organised by Miss Venning and the PE team. It was an evening of glamour and, more importantly, inspiration. Sporting superstars from an amazing range of school and extracurricular sports came together in their glad rags and we were all privileged to hear a keynote speech from Sophie Christiansen, CBE.
Sophie is an eight-time Paralympic equestrian gold medal winner. That alone would be a phenomenal achievement, but Sophie is much more than the sum of those parts. She completed a Maths degree while competing at such a high level, and now works for Goldman Sachs alongside working as a disability campaigner. She was voted fifth, and the top woman, in the particularly highly contested 2016 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award. Her messages of the power of sport, determination in the face of adversity, the sheer power of positive attitude and enjoying the journey resonated deeply.
Sophie helped us to celebrate some extraordinarily talented Abbey athletes, including those who have represented the country in a number of sports and a reigning World Champion. Alongside them, we celebrated individuals who – sometimes quietly – give their all and make a critical difference to their team and teammates. We celebrated Upper VI students who have contributed a huge amount, across a wide range of sports, during their time at the school, and we celebrated students who have more recently embarked on their Abbey sporting journeys.
Just this week, our Under 16 Netball team did phenomenally well to reach the final of the Sisters n Sport National Netball competition, played at Loughborough University and broadcast live. We are so proud of them.
The evening was about glamour, attainment and celebration, but it was clear that those elements are just the tip of the iceberg of any athlete’s sporting life. We have students who get up early every morning to train, whether in the pool, on the river, gym floor, badminton court or football pitch. Behind them are families who have nurtured and fostered their talents and who spend a lot of time driving around the country to training, events and competitions. We do our best to support that at school by being flexible and sometimes building timetables around student sportswomen and their needs.
So Abbey sport is about high achievements but it is also about range of opportunity, collaboration, teamwork and fun. It’s about students enjoying their own personal sporting journeys, whatever they might be, building character and memories hand-in-hand. It is a sad fact that across the country, girls are much more likely than boys to stop playing sports during their mid-teenage years. That trend does not happen at girls’ schools like ours.
Instead, girls get to experience all of the variety brought by sport. Sport isn’t only about physical and mental exercise, but about highs and lows, emotion, drama, resilience, deep personal connections and joy. Nelson Mandela famously said ‘sport has the power to change the world.’ I think he was right. Sport really matters and we are so proud of our Abbey sporting community.
Dr Sarah Tullis, Head