An SBA project by five Form Five students at Mucurapo West Secondary School mushroomed into an all-day sports festival that featured TV6’s Sokafit show as the opening act, at the school’s grounds on March 4.
Isha Chapman, 17; Zakiya Thompson, 17; Natalia Cambridge,18; Shey-Ann Williams, 17; and Joy Ellis, 16, needed to complete a sports project displaying one sport for the School Based Assessment component of their Physical Education CSEC course, in which they would take on the roles of various sports professionals.
They were contemplating what sport to feature when their PE teacher, Maurisa Gibson-Bailey, suggested that they hold a sports festival, instead, in which the whole school could get involved and to which national sports coaches would be invited to scout for talent.
Gibson-Bailey had been following the then three-week old Sokafit programme, produced by Lisa Wickham on TV6, and wondered: Would Ms Wickham be willing to give the students and their festival half an hour of Sokafit’s time?
“We jumped at it,” said Wickham, “because we thought it such an amazing idea to have all these young people, especially in the light of what has been happening in the schools with all the violence, we thought this was something positive and exciting we could jump in and help the school with.
“We called our partners blink | bmobile and they agreed to help. Everything was arranged within three days.” Other firms also contributed to making the event a success, she added.
Sokafit is a new TV health and fitness programme that uses soca music and soca dance as the basis for exercising, a release said. “So just like Zumba uses Latin music, we use the soca music of T&T,” said Wickham. The idea behind the programme is “that you can exercise and still have fun and that it’s important to exercise and to stay healthy.”
TSTT’s acting chief marketing officer, Camille Campbell, said, “The blink | bmobile Foundation was only too glad to support this innovative idea by these fifth formers, knowing how much they would gain from the experience in terms of learning qualities like patience, effort and perseverance in order to complete their project successfully. The sole mission of our foundation is to assist our young people to reach their goals, so this opportunity proved to be an ideal fit for us.”
More than 200 students, decked in green T-shirts provided by blink | bmobile, participated in the Sokafit warm-up to kick off the start of the festival. Gibson-Bailey noted that the national coaches of hockey, football, boxing and rugby were at the school for the opening of the festival.
Gibson-Bailey said there were no words to express her gratitude to Wickham and the blink | bmobile Foundation for their support of the event.
“I think it is really important. We cannot depend on the government to do everything. For me, companies like blink | bmobile have motivated us so that this wave of positivity should continue. There are no words that I can say that can thank Miss Wickham.”
As for their SBA, Zakiya said, “We have videos, pictures of our planning it, setting it up, creating the gym. The pictures will go into our portfolio with the videos on CD.”