As is traditional, every year Woodford County High School has a sports competition called Inter-House Netball for years 7-11. With there being 4 houses and 4 forms, each form competes to win for their house in their year. The points from each year are totalled at the end to find out an overall winner for the school. The Games Captain in each form will put together a team of 7 (possibly 8 or 9 including substitutes), who will go on to compete against each of the other 3 houses. The winner for the year will be the form who has the most goal points altogether, for example last week the year 10s competed and Newton came first, with Highams coming second.


I spoke to Meg Ward, a year 12 student in Newton house about the competition. As she is doing PE AS Level at the moment, she has to choose 2 sports to be assessed on and play different roles within them. She said,


‘As I am quite advanced at netball, I chose to do ‘netball player’ and ‘netball umpire’, which means I have to get lots of practice at these’.


As well as helping out umpiring at year 7 friendly matches against other schools, Meg thought umpiring the Inter House Netball would be a good chance to practice her skills whilst also helping out the younger forms.


I managed to ask Meg some questions about what sports means to her and why more people should get involved.


Why do you think more people should get involved with sports? 
‘Doing sports has many physical, mental and social benefits. Being involved in a sport or club enables you to meet new people, make new friends, or even just socialise with existing ones. It teaches you the value of teamwork as you are always working with others to achieve a common goal. As well as this, I find it can relieve stress or tensions of work and school life. Apart from this there are the obvious reasons, to keep fit and to stay healthy. 


What can young people do to get more involved with sports?
‘Young people can get more involved by joining school clubs and possibly school teams. They could ask their teacher about a specific sport they’re interested in and what is going on with that sport in their area or within school.  They could go online and research and then go with a friend to clubs or sports sessions outside of school, if they live locally then Redbridge Sports Centre have clubs they could look up and maybe get involved with.’


What sports are you personally involved in?
‘I’ve been playing Netball for many years so that’s the main sport I’m interested in. Other than that I also get involved with Cross Country, Rounders and Athletics.’


What do you think about the Government cutting funds for sports?
‘I truly think it is awful as it could be stopping many opportunities, for example at our school (WCHS) we used to hold a dance festival which we could no longer do after the cuts. Programmes that used to be run have now had to be stopped due to a lack of funding and more money means better equipment which we can no longer afford.’