SPORT

Student Achievement

Ella Nast (Year 11) and Lucy Johnston (Year 9) have been selected to represent Pony Club Australia individually and together as a pair in the Pony Club International Alliance Virtual Dressage Competition to be judged early in June.  Filming of their individual elementary test and their Pas de deux freestyle pairs was completed on the weekend for submission last week.

Twelve countries from around the world are invited to submit teams of four riders in each section. The Pas de deux was an event new to Ella and Lucy. They said that although difficult, it was thoroughly enjoyable working together to choreograph and execute a five minute test in pairs to music.  We wish them the very best.

Ali Foot
Head of Sport

Rise Above the Rim – Basketball Shootathon

I am very pleased to update everyone on the wonderful efforts of our students, parents and staff on Saturday 20 May when they completed their Basketball Shootathon. We raised a total of $3,922, part of the Tasmanian total of $38,525 that will now go to directly assist critically ill children and their families, through the Ronald McDonald House Charities. This equates to 240 nights for a family to stay at the house.

A huge thank you to everyone who donated.

And a very special thank you to all our shooters who came from all year levels to work together for such a great cause.

Thank you to our top fundraisers, Justin Thompson (Year 7) $491, Milla Deverell (Year 3) $428 and Angus Seymour (Year 12) $410 (who requested donations from his family in lieu of presents for his 18th Birthday); and so many of our students/parents who all contributed their time and fundraising efforts:

Danielle a’Campo & her two boys (Collegian & Parent)

Zoe Bremner (Year 12), Benji Collins (Year 8), Harrison Collins (Year 4), Oliver Collins (Year 10), Ely Da Costa (Year 11), Matilda Darcey (Year 6), Clementine Dell (Year 6), Esme Dell (Year 8), Sam Denmead (Parent), Nardia & Richard Deverell (Staff & Parent), Mac Edwards (Year 7), Blaise Fitzallen (Year 10), Liam Hodgetts (Year 11), Jasmine Irani (Year 12), Thomas Kubarych (Year 7), Alice Lindsay (Year 12), Poppy Marshall (Year 6), Alice Power (Year 12), Will Stevenson (Year 7), Edie Van Der Aa (Year 6), Chloe Waldron (Year 8).

Thanks to Roger Davis and Donna Mitchell from Swisherr for making our students and families feel so welcome and providing us sustenance all day and Simon Hall, from Glenorchy Basketball, who helped to organise the event for us all here in Launceston.

Once again, our Captains, Zoe Bremner, Alice Lindsay, Angus Seymour and Alice Power, also assisted over the day helping to coordinate all our students to get their shots up, trying to win the multitude of Connect ‘5’ games (in our own adaptation of the game) and generally being fantastic role models for our College.

We all now look forward to making this an annual fun event.

Natalie Good
Director of Basketball

Sports Mindset

Positive Imagery in Performance

In sport and other performance situations, you can use mental imagery primarily to help you get the best out of yourself in training, competitions, or performances, and to open the door to becoming what you can be.  Mental imagery is also highly effective when you have limited practice time, are making a comeback, or are recovering from an injury because you can repeat many successful experiences (in your mind) in a relatively short time without the physical risk or fatigue sometimes associated with doing those skills or performances in the real world.

One of the reasons that mental imagery can be so valuable in performance contexts is that the human brain cannot distinguish between an imagined experience and a real experience.  Both are equally real for your brain.  The same areas of the brain light up in an imagined experience or imagined performance as in a real experience or performance.  For that reason, positive performance imagery has enormous potential.

When you repeatedly imagine yourself doing what you want to do, performing the way that you want to perform, and being what you want to become, you are putting yourself on a path to create a more positive future reality.  Successfully repeating skills, moves, performances, or experiences in your mind and feeling those experiences in your body is often as good as doing them in your physical reality because you can do them perfectly and your brain views them as real.

You need a certain number of successful experiences to create an integrated net of nerve cells (neuronets) in your brain to perform a skill at a high level with consistency.

“A fundamental rule of neuroscience is the nerve cells that fire together, wire together.  If you do something once, a loose collection of neurons will form a network in response, but if you don’t repeat the behaviour, it will not ‘carve a track’ in the brain.  When something is practised over and over again, those nerve cells develop a strong and stronger connection, and it gets easier and easier to fire that network” (Arntz, Chasse, & Vicente, 2005, 147).

Rev Grace
Sports Mindset Coach