St Mary’s Secondary School nets a top award in badminton

ST Mary’s Secondary School, Baldoyle, was absolutely delighted to win the accolade of Badminton Ireland's ‘School of The Year’ for 2018 at their prestigious dinner and awards night held in the Clayton Airport Hotel.

Eimear Fitzpatrick and Suzanne Hyland, teaching staff, collected the award from Con Murphy of RTE. The annual award is presented by Badminton Ireland to schools who have contributed to developing and raising the profile of the sport in Ireland.

St Mary’s Transition Year students once again took part in Badminton Ireland’s Line Judging Training Programme during the autumn, held at Baldoyle Badminton Centre.  

The course trains students to be line judge at matches up to and including international standard. 

Following the course, the girls were then qualified to officiate at this year’s Badminton Irish Open, held at the National Sports Campus in Abbotstown.

Under the guidance and supervision of St Mary's teachers Robert Fennell and Declan Burke and involving Greg Farrell, Aidan Woods and Carol from Badminton Ireland, the girls performed magnificently at the tournament which involved players and teams from all over the world and was televised by TG4. 

Tournament organisers praised the girls for their dedication and hard work, which meant arriving at Baldoyle early every morning to travel out to the sports campus.

The tournament also afforded the girls a chance to witness professional sport at a high level and to mix and interact with people from all around the world. 

Line judging is not for the faint hearted as line calls can be disputed by the players who are looking to win the tournament but at the same time collect ranking points. 

The girls did remarkably well under pressure with a number of them line judging many games. 

The tournament and training programme provided a great opportunity to augment St Mary’s commitment to student wellbeing and to allow students experience one of the highlights in the Irish sporting calendar as part of the school’s Transition Year programme.