There is little doubt that Haileybury is the envy of the APS community with the world class coaches we have at the helm of our First team sports. Household names in their fields like Lloyd, Pendlebury, Brebner, Barbieri, Hodge and Mottram are leading our pinnacle teams and delivering outstanding results. Just this week, the Boys Basketball team won their fifth APS premiership in a row and the Boys Football team has taken a clean sweep in the most competitive school football competition in the land. In the Girls competition, Haileybury was competitive across all sports and but for one or two really close finishes, we could have had a number of teams playing in the first ever round of AGSV Girls Grand Finals. Kudos to the vision and commitment of my predecessors in putting together such an array of outstanding individuals to inspire our talented athletes at the pointy end of school sport.
Since my commencement late last year, my attention has turned to the next generation of Haileybury stars and how we best attract and develop sporting talent to the school.
From an attraction perspective, a lot of work went into the Haileybury Excellence scholarship process to ensure that we were attracting the best talent to add to our efforts. With a criteria that stretched across sporting talents, academic excellence and outstanding character, we identified a cross section of students from multiple sports disciplines in order to bolster the significant talent we already have in the Middle School campuses at Haileybury.
But attracting the talent is only the beginning. Having the best coaches working with players at these formative years is a critical area of focus and already we have made some appointments that reinforce this intent. In Term 1 this year, former Australian cricketer (and all-round great guy) Bobby Quiney took the reigns of our Year 9A cricket team. Over the course of the season, current Essendon AFL player and Old Haileyburian Archie Roberts has supported the 7A and 8A football teams. Earlier this month we announced the exciting news that Nathan Burke was coming in to the program, bringing his extensive experience and passion for girls’ football to focus on developing female footballers from across all age groups. In tennis, we have created a winter development squad for our best emerging talent and also engaged the Tennis Australia Director of Professional Tennis, Paul Kilderry, to guide us in the development of our program. Melissa Barbieri brings her extensive experience as the most capped Matilda of all time in a role that sees her working not only with the first team, but also with the coaches of our Middle School girls soccer program, so that the guiding principles of first team success are fostered in our future players. Finally, in netball our Middle School Girls have benefitted from the expertise of specialist coaching organisation NetFit, who have focused on the development of our passionate staff of netball coaches.
Moving forward, we have recently advertised for a Head of Coaching role, which will be dedicated to the development of all our coaches across the 40+ sporting pursuits that Haileybury offers, focusing particularly on the coaching received in these middle years. We will also harness the talent of our world class Pangea students in connecting them with our own Haileybury athletes so we can learn from their work in some of the most advanced elite talent programs in the world.
On a personal note, I would like to foster the outstanding sporting credentials of some of our Haileybury parents and Alumni in bringing their expertise to our program. So should there be any passionate and credentialed members of our Haileybury community out there who would like to bring their elite expertise to our program, I would love to hear from you.
Matthew Dwyer
Head of Sport (One Haileybury)
