The Last Word

By Nicholas Taggart | Posted: Monday September 9, 2019

Firstly, I’d like to congratulate all the teams who went away on winter tournament last week. From what I’ve heard, you represented the school well, even if you may not have gotten the result you were looking for.

Now as you all should know this terms value is perseverance. Our schools’ value of perseverance involves setting goals, seeking help, being better, and bouncing back. For me perseverance is the ability to get through a task no matter how challenging or frustrating it may be.

Last week I went away with the hockey boys down to old Invercargill, which isn’t the most attractive place to go for tournament. Unfortunately, two weeks before we went away, a key senior player in the team, our centre half Tommy broke his jaw in a game against Johnnies, which meant he wouldn’t be able to play. We bounced back from this, winning our first two games of tournament 8-0, and 6-0. On the second day we had a very close game with a few calls not going our way making us lose 2-3. After this we set our goals for what we needed to work on for the games to come.

The next day we won our morning game 2-0. This set us up so that we had to win the game in the afternoon to go through to the top 4. At half time, the score was 2-1 to the opposition with a bad call and then some pretty dusty keeping from me costing us the goals. We came back into the 3rd quarter strong, holding the majority of possession. Then in the 4th, we got one back bringing us even. However, we also had one of our goals in the fourth quarter disallowed for no apparent reason which in the end caused us to draw the game and not make the semi’s. After this game, everyone was feeling pretty down as we had played extremely well but hadn’t been rewarded for our efforts. So, we went back to our motel and drowned our sorrows in some Minecraft.

The next day we had a choice. We could either throw in the towel or stick it out and show that we deserved to be playing in the top 4. And we did. In that game we had nearly all of the possession and countless opportunities to score but we only managed to get 1, but we’d stuck it out and won 1-0. In the final game of tournament, we showed our skill by dominating the other team and beating them 7-1 to come 5th overall. We had worked hard till the end and shown our perseverance.

I’d like finish off with a quote from Maya Angelou, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”