Recently, a mixture of boys and girls from year 4 and 5 were selected to participate in a ‘Quadkids’ athletics tournament.

The tournament took place in Ipswich and it involved each child taking part in four different events. Their time/ distance would then earn them points for a whole team collaborative total. The four events were: 50m sprint, Vortex throw, 400m run and standing long jump. There were links built between this competition and the recent Commonwealth games where each school had a country to represent, ours being Papua New Guinea.

The tournament was due to take place in the summer term last year however it was postponed due to the hot weather we had at the time. This resulted in the children waiting in anticipation for the opportunity to represent our school for quite a long while. On the day the children were given their athlete number and told to try their absolute best and enjoy themselves.

Throughout the tournament, our children were a credit to the school as they supported each other immensely, especially in the 400m run, and showed great determination and resilience. Not only did they support each other, they also showed great respect to the other schools - one child asked if they could cheer on somebody from another school who was at the time last in their race. Another child, after a very competitive 400m run sat down, shook hands and congratulated the person who he battled for first place alongside.

When the afternoon had concluded all the schools sat down eagerly waiting to hear the results. There were in excess of 20 other schools there, many far larger than us, so they decided to read out the order of the top 8 teams. Despite their incredible efforts on the day, our Rendlesham team did not get to hear their name mentioned in that group. After the event, we have now been made aware that the efforts of our team were in fact worthy of a mention in the top 8. There had been a mistake and our team actually earned an incredible 4th place out of 24 teams and we came first out of the seven schools in our group!

Despite not getting recognition on the day, the children should be so proud of themselves and the 4th place finish they earned. Our achievements do no stop there however, we had some great individual achievements too. One child not only managed to score the fastest time in our group for the 400m run, he also managed to finish 3rd overall out of all 70 children in our group. So a massive congratulations goes to William!

We also had two girls in our team who ended up tied for 4th place out of the 35 girls in our group, so another huge well done to Alice and Elsa! 

As you can tell the day was a massive success for our children who again should be incredibly proud of themselves for not only their individual achievements but for their whole team effort of getting 4th place!