On Tuesday, 30 June the Junior Sports council attended a Leadership day at Adventure specialities trust. On the way, I was thinking about what fun stuff we were going to do. We arrived and we met with Kyle and Tom. They took us to a room full of rock climbing walls that went all the way up to the roof, my excitement levels rose the more I looked around.

Before we could start and learn how to climb, we did a trust exercise where we got into pairs, one of us was blindfolded and the other had to lead the other around a course/maze. When all the groups had finished we got straight into learning how to climb but more importantly, we learnt how to belay which was the support system for the climber.

Once we got the hang of it, we could move around and try different walls. I challenged myself and tried to reach the top of all walls I did. Climbing was super fun and challenging at the same time. Sadly the time was up we packed up and headed to Taipari strand where we had lunch and split into two teams – team Grass and team Ebra. We did two different challenges. My team (team grass) went off with Tom and did two rope challenges first. We had to make a strong enough system with ropes to carry people over two trees without them touching the ground. In this challenge, the group and I learnt different knots to make the system strong and learnt to communicate well and to use teamwork skills. We then swapped and took the teamwork skills from the first challenge and used them in the other challenge with Kyle, which involved a slackline. There was a sheet of paper with lots of different challenges to do on the slackline.  We had to complete as much we could in the time we had. There were some challenging ones, some easy ones and some in between.

In the end, we came together and talked about how each group did and we were given scores. Team Ebra ended up with bragging rights. However, this would not have happened without Gill, Kyle and Tom.

Thank you so much for an awesome day out filled with fun and bonded time. We learnt stuff to help us as a leader and as a sports player.