From the beginning of lockdown, it was clear to us, as Heads of Sport, that our role was going to take a completely different turn with the postponement of all sports and the lockdown of everyday life. It was important we encouraged our wider Carmel Community to stay active and busy during such a difficult and uncertain time. Using our Instagram page @carmelsport as our platform we introduced weekly challenges and fun, new exciting content to encourage activity.

Our first set of challenges and initiatives came through weekly workout Wednesdays where we posted a new workout you could try weekly.

We also set up the Carmel College ‘Pass It On Challenge’. This consisted of filming yourself receiving and passing a ball on and then tagging a fellow Carmel member to participate in the challenge.

Next, we introduced the ideas of Sports Council member ‘story takeovers.’ This comprised of members of our very talented Sports Council taking over our Instagram story daily and showing us how they were staying fit and adapting their training in lockdown. With these story takeovers, we also introduced four new challenges for the remaining time of lockdown. These were our at home workout challenge, the handstand challenge, the trick shot challenge and the run NZ challenge.

Particularly our most recent challenge – running and walking NZ has shown how, in times of uncertainty, the Carmel College community can come together in solidarity for challenges such as these. This challenge has been running for around a week and a half now and we have managed to travel 1,368km, aiming to finish the 1,600km before we return to school. The participation in this particular challenge has been incredible from both teachers and students running and walking, small and wide. We are mapping our distances travelled every couple of days to keep people updated and posting everyone’s runs and walks on our stories for accountability and motivation. Above all this challenge of running and walking New Zealand collectively highlights how in this lockdown our Carmel community rose to the challenge and came together.

For anyone interested in seeing these challenges in action, all our lockdown activities can be found on our Carmel sports Instagram highlights.