Primary school pupils from both Kingsmills and St Peter’s Cloughreagh visited St Paul’s for the second annual ‘Best Ball’ tournament on Thursday the 3rd of Marh, 2016.

The BestBall programme, now in its second year, is a cross curricular initiative being run by the school as part of the Shared Education Programme. This a very important tournament for our area as it brings together primary school children from different communities and backgrounds in Northern Ireland which in years gone by would never have been the case.

For the past number of months our Outreach coach, Mr James Shannon, has been in both primary schools preparing the pupils for the festival. On Thursday the 3rd of March the schools came together to show off all the skills they have learned over the course of the programme. In total 70 pupils participated with over 40 matches played in a hugely enjoyable festival, promoting all that is good about sport in our local community.

The Year 12 and Upper sixth BTEC students were tasked with the role of organising this tournament as part of their respective courses and the many roles and responsibilities that were needed to be carried out were all completed very successfully, which was very apparent with smooth and successful running of the tournament. All together there were seven students from Year 12 and 6 from Year 14.

The tournament culminated with Costa Rica winning the overall cup competition. The PE department would like to thank everyone who was involved on the day; both schools, their coaches, our Canteen staff who provided lunch and particularly the Year 12 and Upper 6th BTEC Sport students who organised the tournament as part of their studies.

See below for some photos from the event.