Organizing An Inter-School Taekwondo Competition
Every year fountainhead School organises inter-school competitions for a range of sports like football, basketball etc. This year I along with my two friends took the initiative to organize taekwondo championship for age groups between 14 to 17 years. Not many people play taekwondo or are even aware about this sport so we took up this responsibility with the aim of encouraging as many students as possible to be a part of this event.
The learning outcomes covered in the activity are listed below.
Learning outcome one: Before taking the initiative of organizing any CAS activity it is important to identify one’s strengths and one’s partners strengths and skills too. One of the strengths I had was having first-hand experience.As I had been playing this sport for 2 years in my PS and I also had participated in a few competitions so I had knowledge about various things like about the rules and regulations required to be followed in a tournament, about how this event is organized by other schools or authorities, what were the drawbacks that were common in these events like the mismanagement of the ring and how we could make sure that participants do not have the same concerns or difficulties like they had in the previous events. I also shared a good rapport with my taekwondo coach as a result of this understanding each other’s expectations from this event and communication became much more easier. One new skill which I learned in the process of organizing this event was to identify skills of my group members and then divide work accordingly. Like one of my partners had good organization and technical skills so she took charge of making and updating a spreadsheet for the participation entries.
Learning outcome two: One of the main challenges we faced was time constraint in writing the certificates. As we had to constantly update the registrations we just got 4 to 5 days to write about 400 certificates. It was a tedious task to write the certificate and then to arrange them according to the school’s name and the age category. This was not the end we also had to collect all the resources from our coach like stopwatches, head guards etc and give it to respective people and. Making the ring was also difficult as we had to pick up all the mats 100-200 mats from the gymnasiao and arrange them in the assembly area as per the official requirements. As the mats were really heavy it wasn’t possible for the 3 of us do this task all alone so we had to convince our classmates and the members of support staff to help us. On the day of the event, it was difficult to manage the participants and to make sure that they don’t enter the ring while the competition is going on. in order to ensure that discipline is maintained we had had to persuade the students of fountainhead present on the day to volunteer to maintain discipline and make sure that there is no disturbance while the match is going on.
Learning outcome 4: Staying committed right from the process of planning to organizing of an event is very important in order to make it successful. Due to many coursework’s submission during the time of the event, it became difficult to devote time to this event. We also had to come early, do stay back or give up over our free slots to complete the pending work and this made us feel overburdened and we wanted to quit however we got motivated by looking at the long-term scenario of making the event a huge success and achieving our aim of creating awareness about the sport.Also writing all the certificates was tiring and difficult as we had very less free slots .Not all the work could be completed in school so some of the work had to be taken home. Even though I found it easy it required so many efforts and time.I find it easy to be committed to things because I want to complete things perfectly once I take the responsibility.
Learning outcome 5: being in a group was a huge advantage as we could divide our work according to our skills. This helped us focus on our respective tasks and be clear about each other’s responsibility further helping us to avoid confusion. I could also learn and develop skills which my partner had. Like my partner had good technical skills so she taught me some shortcuts and tricks which will help me in future. We also motivated each other and gave each other constant reminders about the deadlines set this helped us to complete every task on time and made the event successful
Learning outcome 7; Many ethical considerations were taken care of while planning and conducting the event. Most of the sports competitions tend to be biased towards the home teams but we wanted our event to be fair in order to ensure this we divided the weight categories on the day of the event on the basis of the participants weight on the day of the event to make sure that participants with the same weight compete each other.we also made sure that referees were fair, to ensure this we had assigned volunteers who had knowledge about the rules and regulations of the sport. We ensured that the certificates and medals handed on the day of the event only to the respective participants.
