Dear Parents,
What a busy first week back, driving on ensuring focus and progress from all year groups.
Thursday saw the first of our PSHE days this term. We recognise that academic outcomes are extremely important in school, but so are the other skills that create our Compass character. Nurturing wellbeing, resilience and purpose. Fostering creativity and globally connectedness. All year groups took part in the PSHE day. It saw the Year 12 students visit a university fair, the Year 11s had careers interviews regarding their next steps and how to get there, Year 10 took part in a well being morning. With the new stresses of IGCSEs they learnt techniques to deal with stress with a visit from a Yoga teacher. They also had careers talks from business leaders in Doha. Year 9 had a taster day for their IGCSE options choices, having the opportunity to try out subjects they haven’t been in before to see whether they would like it or not. Year 8 participated in more practical skills looking at healthy eating and nutrition, how to use a gym and there was huge engagement in how to maintain a car and Year 7 looked at online safety.
Following the BISQ Games, I asked the boy and girl captains to write a summary of the weekend from their perspective.
By Benjamin Wheatley
BISQ is a sports event that is held once a year for Under 13s. It consists of four sports: football, basketball, swimming and athletics. 13 of the top British schools in Qatar compete in this.
Day 1
On the first day we arrived at Al Saad Sports Club for the opening ceremony. We met as a team at 7.30 am and then walked over to where the opening ceremony was going to be held. After that we were given an overview of everything we needed to know by the people who had organised BISQ. We then went off to our first event. The boys went to basketball.
Basketball
We lost our first game to Doha Collage in a close game. We then went on to make it to the playoff in which we lost our semi-final and then went on to the 3rd and 4th play off. We were faced up against a very good Dukan team who ended up beating us in a nail-biting game. Overall everyone played very well and we were extremely unlucky to miss out on third place.
Swimming
After Basketball the team had about an hour break before swimming. We did very well at the start and won the first races in the form of Daniel and AR both coming first in their 100m Individual medleys. After a good start the team then went on to win many other races throughout the day. There were no medals if you won a race but were given points which were then added up to find out the overall winner for swimming. We had performed very well and were all anxious to see if we had done enough to get a medal. We had! It was between us and Doha Collage to see who had won swimming. We narrowly missed out on gold by just 5 points. Another good thing about winning the silver was that Mr. Nixon had told us that if we came first, second or third we would get to wax one of his legs in assembly. At the time of writing this, we have not, but we must make sure to.
Day 2
Football
We were all excited for football as we knew we had a fair crack at making it to the podium. Without a doubt we had been put in a very hard pool with Doha College, Qatar International School and Doha British School. We won our first game and went on to draw the rest. We just missed out on making it to the playoffs for the top 4 but managed to make it to the plate playoffs were we faced off against Oryx winning 3-0 and then eventually beating Gems Wellington School 3-0 to win the plate playoffs managing to come out of football with some silver wear.
Athletics
Again, we had an hour break before athletics began. We did well by winning some events including the 400m race which Reagan absolutely dominated by winning by at least 10m. After battling it out all day in track and field events we ended up coming in 5th.
Ceremony
To conclude the final day of BISQ 2020 all the schools gathered and waited with anticipation as the results came in for the overall rankings. We didn’t make to the top three but ended up coming an impressive fifth out of all the thirteen schools. As a team we exceeded expectations considering the limited facilities we had available to us during training. Many other schools also have Evo come to their schools to trains these kinds of sports.
I would like to thank the secondary P.E staff for making this event possible and all the parents who supported the team. All the students cannot thank you enough.
By Olivia Maryott
Hi, I am Olivia and I am the captain of the girl's BISQ squad. I have been given the task to write about the BISQ tournament and to be completely honest I loved it, not only were the girls amazing, but considering we have had little time to train we did phenomenally well.
I am incredibly proud of everyone in the squad but would like to give specific mention to the individual sports captains. Rachel Marshell was the captain of the swim team; she was amazing in the swimming competition. She also does lots of swimming activities outside of school, and her experience was very helpful. Some of us didn't have much time to train for our events so she guided us as a coach and her advice led us to finish 2nd overall in the swimming, winning a lovely trophy.
This brings me to our next captain; Natali is amazing when it comes to netball. She is like a teacher when someone is at a learning curve and loves to make conversation when someone is nervous to help them calm down. She also is in EVO and her training and knowledge of the game and other players helped us get 4th, losing out on 3rd place in a very close game with Sherborne.
Our next Captain is non-other than my sister Asha, she was able to show great support to the team even after she hurt her groin during her athletic event and had to sit out. Rather than going home she wanted to cheer on the team and stayed right to the end. There were some fantastic individual girls’ performances in the athletics especially Kashish who was super-fast!
Overall, I am very proud of our team and all the other teams we faced. This was an extremely fun competition and I hope there will be more and that more people will become part of the team.
Big thanks to the PE department who gave up their evening and weekend to help us get to our overall finishing position of 5th.
I look forward to sharing with you another busy weekend and week in MK secondary next week. This weekend we have IB oral exams, the MUN conference and in the week, we have the Year 9 Options evening where Year 9 choose their IGCSE subjects for next year.
Yours sincerely,
Tom Douch
Head of Secondary, Madinat Khalifa
