The Sport faculty have had another exceptional year

This year twenty of our students have achieved international honours in a range of sports form Rugby Union and Hockey to Dragon Boating. Special mention should go to Marcus Street who represented England Rugby at the under 20’s World Cup, despite still being 18! He is an outstanding talent and one to look out for in the future.

Emily Piper – Dragon Boat Racing

Emily has been a member of our ACES Academy for the last two years and during this time she has been selected for the Great Britain Ladies Dragon Boat squad.

Emily said:

The dragon boat racing season ended about 2 months ago, and for that season at my club, I was awarded the most improved under 18. I am the fastest under 18 in the club with a time of 3.07 over 500m, 12 seconds faster than my time last year. I have had some recent success in the European Championships in Rome earlier this year, bringing home 3 silver and 3 bronze medals’

Women’s Rugby

Our Women’s Rugby Academy, in partnership with Exeter Chiefs, has made huge progress this year. 14 girls are benefiting from regular training sessions, strength and conditioning, AASE fixtures, local development sessions with other FE Colleges and a partnership with the University of Exeter, who themselves are coached by the England under 20 coach Jo Yapp, thus providing fantastic potential opportunities for our players to showcase their skills.

Football

Our partnership with Exeter City Football Club continues to thrive with Futsal now under the Academy banner. With our strength in depth as well as more local fixtures, this year we entered our 1st team into the AoC Sport Category 1 league and moved our 2nd team from Category 3 into Category 2. This allows much higher standards of football for both teams against quality opposition. Our 1st teams and our Women’s team play in Exeter City Kit provided by the club as part of our partnership.

Tennis

Training started at the beginning of September ahead of the AEGON Senior student & AOC competitions in conjunction with the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA).

On November 2nd our highest rated tennis players at the college travelled to Tarka Tennis Centre in Barnstaple for the AOC Sport regional Singles competition. 7 students took part (3 girls and 4 boys). The level of tennis at this event was outstanding with all players competing hard throughout the day, the great news was that Ben Greatrex and Fredrick James will represent the South West at the AOC National Championships in April.

In the AEGON competition it was the boy’s team up first where 4 of our students took on Truro College for a place in the knockout stages of the competition in January. The fixture took place at the South Devon Tennis Centre in Ivybridge, our team competed hard and it was a tough match with Truro eventually coming through to move onto the knockout stages.

Emily Bale – Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme (TASS)

Emily Bale is studying the BTEC Extended Diploma in Sport and is from Barnstaple. In September, she was awarded a place on the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme. Emily is a GB international Rifle Shooter. She has two brothers who have also competed in the sport. Jack, who was 1.4 points off winning a Quota place for the Rio Olympics at the European Games back in February and her other brother Dean, who was a member of the College ACES Academy and made the Junior World Cup final twice, as well as the World University Championship final.

Emily says:

My brothers have been such an Inspiration to my career, my end goal is to compete and win an Olympic medal and I'm well onto the pathway to do so in the future. I've taken part in previous talent identification programmes called Target Tokyo, I made it into the third and final stage. My next competition is in Luxembourg in December called RIAC which is a 10 meter international match, followed by Intershoot which is another 10 meter competition in February held in the Netherlands.”

AoC Championships

This academic year, after various regional tournaments, the Sports Faculty is exceptionally proud that an unprecedented 86 students will be competing at the National Championships in Nottingham which surpasses last year’s total and could mean Exeter College have the largest contingent of students at the 2017 National Championships. The college took students for Men’s Football, Men’s basketball, Netball, Women’s Hockey, Women’s Rugby, Cricket, four Golfers, five Cross Country contestants, four Badminton and two Tennis players, all who won their respective regional competitions. We are delighted that the South West placed second in the overall competition, with Exeter College students making a huge contribution to this result.

Basketball

Our Basketball team finished fourth in Division 1 of the Exeter & District Basketball League (E&DBL) after winning promotion last academic year and reached the semi-final of the AoC Sport National Cup beating SGS in the quarter Final. In April the team won the E&D men’s inter divisional championship for the second year running.