Track teams from other schools around Colombo came to OSC to compete against OSC’s primary school team. A couple other of my teammates of the SAISA team and I volunteered to stay at school after a challenging track and field Saturday morning practice to help out with the track meet.

Our first job was to time the 50meter sprints. In order to do this we delegated the jobs, Talia used the iPad app called Coaches Eye to time the athletes, Andrew used the stopwatches to double-check the times, and I had to remember the order of the athletes when they crossed the finish line.

The officials timing the races.

We then moved to the field event sessions, I worked with Ms. Kelly, Talia, and Chloe to organize the athletes, measure their jumps, record the measurements, and rake the sandpit for the under 10-year-old girls. I was in charge of announcing the next athlete to jump and making sure they were in the right place when it was their turn. I then helped to measure the distance of the jump and recorded the measurement.After a short break of watching the high jump event, we again helped to measure and record the long jump event for the older age group.

Recording the measurements. (Talia)

A visiting long jump athlete from CIS.

Another job that I had was the runner, whenever the coaches from OSC and the other schools needed help finding something, I would help them. For example, I had to run to find Ms. Kelly’s clipboard in the coaches’ office for the long jump event. I also had to find the first aid kit for the coach from Elizabeth Moir school because an athlete had hurt themselves on their spikes.

We finished the day with timing the 4x50m and 4x100m relays. I again had the job of remembering the order of the teams crossing the finish line. I also had to create a barrier with Chloe to prevent kids from running in front of the iPad and covering the athletes finishing the race.

Helping out with this track meet made me recognized the benefits of working collaboratively because with both timing races and measuring jumps we each had a task that we had to accomplish that was important in order to record the correct results.