Saints celebrates 70th birthday

ST STITHIANS College hosts their annual Saints Sports Festival every year over the Easter period, and it is a much-loved and highly anticipated event on the Saints calendar.

The St Stithians family of eight schools looks forward to welcoming one and all to the 2023 Saints Sports Festival. This year, Saints celebrates the 70th birthday of the college, and the theme for 2023 is “A Legacy of Happy Fulfilment” as inscribed on its foundation stone.

This festival embodies this in every way: a celebration of life, fulfilment and the joy of school sports. The school relishes the opportunity that this festival offers it to see its campus fields, courts and Astros, filled with happy and fulfilled students.

The festival is an eagerly awaited opportunity for its community of belonging of current and past parents and students to come together, gather, meet and reminisce.

Its Alumni Games, which was launched in 2019, has become a firm favourite at the festival and adds a wonderful opportunity for the Old Stithians to step back onto the fields where they once represented Saints and again represent their school with pride.

The 2023 edition of the Saints Sportsfest runs over two consecutive weekends, and begins with the Prep Festival, which runs from March 30 to April 1, followed by the College Festival, which runs over the Easter weekend on April 5, 6, 8 and 10.

As always, the festival promises to be jam-packed, offering something for everyone to enjoy.

As the oldest schools sports festival of its kind, this event has gone from a rugby festival in its inception year of 1984 to a festival including all of its schools on campus across multiple sporting codes 39 years later.

This year, it celebrates 10 years of tennis being a part of the festival, and the courts will play host to some fun festivities in acknowledgement of a decade of tennis at Saints Sportsfest.

And the school looks forward to celebrating the 40th anniversary of the festival in 2024.

In this year’s Prep Festival, it has over 1 000 participants made up of 103 teams from 60 schools. For the College Festival there will be over 1 100 participants made up of 88 teams, representing 87 schools. The

Prep Festival schools will be competing in rugby, squash, tennis and netball in this year’s edition. They also welcome their Grade 2 children from Junior Prep into the festival for 2023, who will be playing inter-house hockey on the Saturday of the Prep Festival.

The colleges are playing football, hockey, netball, rugby, squash and tennis, with a Fun Run on Family Day, Easter Monday, for one and all.

The school is delighted to welcome back its Thandulwazi Maths and Science Academy to the festival in 2023.

The Saints Sports Festival is the biggest event on its annual calendar, and it takes an enormous amount of planning and effort to bring it to life.

The school’s behind the scenes teams work tirelessly to make the festival the legendary event that it has become.

“We express our profound gratitude to our staff from so many different campus and school departments for their commitment and enthusiasm.

“We certainly could not achieve the success that we do without our

passionate parent organisers and many volunteers that give of their time, talent and treasure to the festival,” the school said.

“Finally, we extend our gratitude to our sponsors, in particular, our major partner Standard Bank who has been a part of the festival for many years. All of our sponsors, along with our suppliers and service providers, play an integral role in the ensuring a wellrun, fun and fulfilling festival. We look forward with anticipation to the 2023 edition.”