As another summer games has come to an end, we have been looking back on the last few months of competitions. Whilst it’s not been like our usual summer games, it certainly hasn’t been any less exciting!
With the outbreak of Coronavirus in March forcing schools to close, we couldn’t let pupils miss out on taking part in the school games, so we changed our offer to a virtual one! Each week one of our school games organisers set a challenge for anyone to have a go at. Pupils, siblings, teachers and even parents were encouraged to join in. Challenges could be easily carried out at home or school and were based around personal improvement, in line with the sports and events that were due to be part of our summer programme. Challenges included: tennis, golf, cricket, athletics, angling and netball.
On top of this, we finished our virtual summer calendar with a rainbow run to replace our colour run which would normally engage hundreds of pupils. Children, young people and families around the county were asked to put on brightly coloured clothes and go for a run on the same day. A live tally was kept throughout the day so we knew how many people were taking part. We had a brilliant 900 people participate and 68 schools. It was great to see pictures of so many people donning their bright colours!
Across all challenges, nearly 700 entries were sent in either through email or via our social media challenges and 114 schools were represented across the county. It was fantastic to see how creative people could be when completing the challenges; brooms used as golf clubs and frying pans as tennis rackets!
Our brilliant school games photographer Matt has compiled all entries and created videos to celebrate the success of this summer. These videos as well as all the challenges set have been uploaded to our YouTube account. You can view them here. Did you take part in any of the virtual challenges? See if you can spot yourself!
Physical activity is more important now than ever and the virtual challenges have been a great way to continue to encourage and motivate young people to be active as well as keeping the school games spirit alive.
We want to say a big thank you to everyone who took part in the challenges, shared and liked social media posts and got involved with our summer of virtual events. We are working on our offer for next year and will share more information in the next couple of months.
If you’d like any ideas on how you can keep active this summer, Active Norfolk have lots of ideas- https://www.activenorfolk.org/active-at-home
