We organized a box cricket tournament at a turf ground outside the school and invited players from the school as well as from outside the school to make their teams and participate in the tournament. Cricket is one of the most played and watched sport in India, however, Fountainhead doesn’t offer cricket as a sport. Thus, we thought that this tournament will act as a platform for students to exhibit their passion for the sport. We took sponsorships from 8 businesses to help us organize a more professional tournament. We decided to donate 50% of our profits to an orphanage as an act of service. The LOs I covered in the activity were 1,2,3,4,5 and 7.
LO1:- Identify own strengths and develop areas of growth
While organizing this event, I identified that I have good negotiation and communication skills which made it very easy for me to deal with all of the students who wanted to play and all the sponsors. Also, I was effectively able to negotiate proper rates for the turf ground. However, I don’t possess credible management skills. It gets difficult for me to manage 2-3 tasks at a go. Thus, I developed the strategy of delegating work. We had volunteers for our tournament who helped us make it successful.
LO2:- Demonstrate that challenges that have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
In the earlier stage, it was difficult for us to get sufficient teams for our tournament. We wanted 16 to have a knock-out tournament, however, we only got 10 teams. Finding more players and convincing them to play was a very challenging task. We overcame this challenge by marketing our project more. We shared the details of our tournament on social media to make people aware of it. Along with that, we also made posters and stuck it all around the school so that everyone knows that there is a tournament being organized. We also kept free water service and assured the parents’ safety of their wards. Summing it up, we successfully overcame the challenge with the use of marketing skills.
LO3:- Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
Planning of our CAS project was relatively easy, however, the initiation part was a bit difficult. Our initial planning was that we would easily get 16 teams for our tournament. We had all the players ready until our planning stage. However, when we started initiating and asked them for payment for playing, a lot of teams backed out and we only had 10 teams. Thus, we had to go out looking for more teams so that we could organize a proper tournament. Also, earlier we planned to organize our tournament at a different location, however, cost and availibility issues led to us changing the location at the last moment which caused a lot of chaos. We learned that our planning must be effective in order to ensure a smooth initiation of planning.
LO4:- Show commitment to and perseverance to CAS experiences
Hosting a tournament required a lot of work to be done. Thus, we had to meet outside school multiple times as well as in school. We missed our free slots and our lunch breaks to stick posters, discuss and plan, take payments. We had to travel far to get trophies and equipment for the tournament as well due to which we all had to bunk school. We missed a lot of our classes in order to make this event successful, however, at the end of the day it did pay off!
LO5:- Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
From this project, I learned that cooperation and communication are the most vital while working collaboratively. There were many instances where my partners and I couldn’t agree to a particular decision which led to quarrels, however, we were good friends and thus, we had mutual understand and we could communicate very frankly which made it easier to work together. Having partners helped us delegate work as well. We were 3 partners and divided the work of refereeing, score keeping and managing the teams amongst us which made things easier.
LO7:- Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
When we were finding a location for our tournament, we had a lot of locations where under-the-table dealings were done, where we had to pay less for the same ground. The transactor asked us for some money to be given to him personally so that we can book the ground at a cheaper rate. However, we believed in ethics and as our school motto says “A leader does the right thing even when nobody is watching”, we paid the full amount of cost for the ground and avoided any under-the-table dealings so that we do not face any issues later.
We learned a lot from this CAS Project. We understood how important it is to plan at an earlier stage and how difficult it is to organise a whole tournament. I also learnt the importance of delegation of work to partners and how the most effective form of leadership is being a democratic leader!
