Auckland Secondary Schools Volleyball Championships 2023
Posted on March 20, 2023
The Auckland Secondary Schools Volleyball Championships were held at the Bruce Pulman Arena in Takanini, over three days last week.
This is biggest event that College Sport undertakes featuring over 50 schools in both the boys’ and girls’ sections. Even with strike action on Thursday, College Sport are again to be congratulated for how they still went ahead in potentially difficult circumstances as they did with the pandemic last year.
The tournament was a huge success with twelve courts in action from 8 am in the morning until 10 pm at night.
The Macleans College Premier Boys finished 12th which was an excellent result considering over half the team is Year 11 and still have two more years to improve (last year’s team also played well but finished 13th). The boys finished second in their pool behind the eventual winners, Rangitoto College, with some very exciting matches against Avondale College and Saint Kentigern College. This placed Macleans College in the first division, playing for positions one to sixteen.
On the second day the Premier Boys narrowly lost to Orewa College and Takapuna Grammar School, both matches 2-1 that could have gone either way, so very close to the quarter finals. The boys’ then beat Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate and lost their last match to De La Salle College to gain a creditable 12th. The stand out players were Javier Kruger (Te Kanawa House) and captain Muhamad Jasin (Batten).
The Macleans College Premier Girls are also a very young team with four players in Year 11 and two in Year 10. On the first day, they had the best matches of the year beating Albany Senior High School and then extremely narrow losses to Otahuhu College and Mangere College both only 2-1. They just missed out on division one but continued to play well and eventually finished 8th in the second division. Last year’s much stronger team had only managed 4th.
Hana Rose (Hillary) was an outstanding leader on the court and led by example, and very well backed up by Ally Chu (Mansfield) and Mulan Chan See (Snell).
Thank you to the coaches Randy Jiang (Te Kanawa House 2014 – 2018) and Sinead Olliver. These very keen and dedicated coaches are responsible for the Macleans College success and we look forward to even better results after another hard year’s work. The National Tournament is now looking a distinct possibility for next year.
