With thanks to Year 8 student reporter, Max Trankels

The Winter Festival Water Polo Tournament is an annual event open to all Year 7 & 8 school teams in New Zealand. Held in Auckland this year, the tournament takes place over three days attracting strong, competitive play.

Max Trankels reports:
The Winter Festival Water Polo tournament was the first opportunity for the Saint Kentigern Boys’ School A and B teams to play against schools outside of the familiar Central league. The schools were mainly from the North Shore along with a team from Mt Maunganui Intermediate. The A grade consisted of twelve teams split into two pools. As luck would have it, we had a tough pool with St Cuthbert’s College, Murrays Bay Intermediate, Northcross Intermediate, Auckland Normal Intermediate and St Peter’s College, all strong school teams. We hadn’t played the first three teams, but St Cuthbert’s reputation was unmatched, and the North Shore teams are always hard competitors.

We won our first two matches against Northcross Intermediate (16-1) and St Peter’s College (10-0) which gave us the confidence we would need in our next game against St Cuthbert’s College. After a strong three quarters, the score was tight at 4-2 to St Cuthbert’s, but the game didn’t go our way in the last quarter with the final score being a well-deserved 7-3 to St Cuthbert’s. Thanks to Hugo Bricklebank, our goalkeeper, for keeping us in the game.

We won our last two pool games against Murray’s Bay Intermediate, which was only won in the last minute (7-6) and Auckland Normal Intermediate (13-4). A huge thanks to George McGuinness for his tight marking and determination against Murray’s Bay Intermediate.

After the pool games, we progressed straight to the finals as there were no semi-finals. Having placed 2^nd in Pool A, we faced Mt Maunganui Intermediate, who were 2^nd in their pool, to play off for 3^rd and 4^th place.  After great passing, communication and shooting, we came out on top with the final score of 9-5 to place 3^rd in the A grade division.

The team is proud of their achievement, coming together and putting 100% into every game they played. It has been great to see how far we have come, as we only started playing together last term. 

We hope to continue our success in our next tournament at AIMS. Thanks to our coaches Ben Sterrit and Sam Looker for their guidance throughout the tournament.

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