Our annual Saints Sports Festival is a much-loved and highly anticipated event on the St Stithians College calendar. The St Stithians family of eight schools looks forward to welcoming One and All to the 2023 Saints Sports Festival. This year we celebrate the 70th birthday of the College and our theme is ‘A Legacy of Happy Fulfilment’ as inscribed on our foundation stone. This Festival embodies this in every way, a celebration of life, fulfilment and of the joy of school sport. We relish the opportunity that this Festival offers us to see our Campus fields, courts and astros filled with happy and fulfilled students.
The Festival is an eagerly awaited opportunity for our community of belonging of current and past parents and students to come together, to gather, meet and reminisce. Our Alumni Games, which was launched in 2019 has become a firm favorite at the Festival and adds a wonderful opportunity for our Old Stithians to step back onto the fields where they once represented Saints and again represent their school with pride.
The 2023 edition of our Saints SportsFest runs over two consecutive weekends and begins with the Prep Festival which runs from 30 March to 1 April followed by the College Festival which runs over the Easter weekend on 5, 6, 8 and 10 April. As always, the Festival promises to be jam-packed offering something for everyone to enjoy. As the oldest schools’ sports festival of its kind, it has been incredible to watch this event go from a rugby festival in its inception year of 1984, to a festival including all of our schools on campus across multiple sporting codes thirty-nine years later. This year we celebrate 10 years of tennis being a part of the Festival and the courts will play host to some fun festivities in acknowledgement of a decade of tennis at Saints SportsFest. And speaking of anniversaries, we look forward to celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Festival in 2024.
In this year’s Prep Festival, we have over 1000 participants, made up of 103 teams from 60 schools. For the College Festival, over 1100 participants made up of 88 teams and representing 87 schools. The Prep Festival schools will be competing in Rugby, Squash, Tennis and Netball in this year’s edition. We welcome our Grade 2 children from Junior Prep into the Festival for 2023 – they will be playing interhouse hockey on the Saturday of our Prep Festival and we can’t wait to see them in action on our Astros. The Colleges are playing Football, Hockey, Netball, Rugby, Squash and Tennis with a Fun Run on Family Day, Easter Monday, for One and All. We are delighted to welcome back our Thandulwazi Maths and Science Academy to the Festival in 2023 and even more so as they will be entering both a girls’ and boys’ team this year. We wish them well.
As a Methodist school, we are mindful that the Sports Festival takes place over the Holy Easter weekend,. As Christians mark the crucifixion of Christ and his resurrection, we welcome members of any denomination to worship with us. Services will be held on Good Friday in the Chapel (07h45 – 08h30) and Sunday in the Chapel (09h00 to 10h00) with a children’s ministry offered in the Boys’ College Quad. We look forward to welcoming One and All.
Our Saints Sports Festival is the biggest event on our annual calendar and takes an enormous amount of planning and effort to bring it to life. Our behind the scenes teams work tirelessly to make the Festival the legendary event that it has become. We express our profound gratitude to our staff from so many different campus and school departments for their commitment and enthusiasm. We certainly could not achieve the success that we do without our passionate parent organisers and many volunteers that give of their time, talent and treasure to the Festival. Finally, we extend our gratitude to our sponsors, in particular our major partner Standard Bank who has been a part of the Festival for many years. All of our sponsors, along with our suppliers and service providers play an integral role in the ensuring a well-run, fun and fulfilling Festival.
We look forward with anticipation to the 2023 edition!
