School Games 2015

This month saw Oxfordshire’s level 3 event close the 2014-15 School Games programme. The Sainsbury’s school games forms the school sport offer run through DCMS, Sport England and the Youth Sport Trust. 

The School Games programme runs over four levels of competitive activity. Levels 1 and 2 are a mix of intra and inter school competition.

Level 3 events are annual county day events, or for the larger participant sports including some of the indoor rowing events, run as branded stand-alone day long competitions. Level 3’s often run with opening ceremonies with thousands of young people taking part in over eight sports within large sporting venues in county areas – a mini Olympic event supported by local radio stations, musical and dance acts from local schools and Team GB medallists. 

Level 4 is a national event multi-sport residential style event.

With direct support from British Rowing at level 3, 4000 young people between the ages of 13-18 raced at one of 32 county events from a pool of 18,000 young people who had competed at level 2 in inter-school competitions.

As part of support for the program, British Rowing have been logging individual results from level 3 events into its rowlog.org website database to give competitors the opportunity to see how they fair nationally.

As part of each event young leaders are trained to run the event management and race software, and for the brave even take on the event commentary!

This year saw 4 new events; West Yorkshire, Tees Valley, Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire and Luton who added a mainstream event alongside the RowAbility Event already in their program.

RowAbility runs within 10 level 3 events, with just under 400 young people with SEND and physical disability competing in a format of ability level rather than disability.

Several competitors whom started out rowing as part of the School Games programme have since moved on to rowing on the water. Some have been selected for the the British Rowing England Talent Pathway program, and gone on to junior trials. One athlete has since moved into the World Class Start programme. 

One young girl even managed to make the news after beating a long standing record in her age group!

Results from this year’s events can be found on the below link;

https://www.britishrowing.org/schools/sainsburys-school-games-201415

Dates for the 2015/16 season are likely to be set October with events running from December through to July. Clubs who are interested in promoting themselves to school games competitors next year should contact their Area Participation Manager or Dan Hetherington.