Douglas Community School athletes competed in the latest leg of their Mile Challenge series recently at Cork IT track. The first year race was won by Jack O’ Mahony with a superb time of 5.34 and he was followed home closely by Liam Harris 5.38, Kevin Horan 5.42 and Jamie O’ Connell 5.43. Other great runs came from Luke Varian, Rory Barry, Stephen Cotter and Declan O’ Herlihy. In the older race Cullen Lynch had a fine win in 4.52 with other superb runs coming from Ian Tobin, Mark Seacy, Andrew O’ Keeffe, Billy Murphy and Jamie Sullivan. Next up for the athletes is the Munster Schools Cross-Country Championships in Cork where the school aims to retain the best overall school cup for the 6th consecutive year.

Steven Macklin

Two DCS teachers, Rosanne O’Callaghan and Neil Bronks, have returned from a successful visit to Uganda and will be putting together a report on this in the coming days.  This report will be posted here as soon as possible.

The next and most significant part of the project will be the visit of two Ugandan teachers to DCS for a week in April.  It is expected that they will get to participate as much as possible in the life of the school.

On Monday 19 April, we will have a visit from the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin TD, at 9.30am.  This will be the opening part of a Developmental Education Morning in the school.  We hope that as many students as possible will be able to participate in some way in this event.  We have organised for well over a dozen different speakers from various charities and development agencies to come to the school.  Each speaker will make a presentation to one or two class groups after the Minister’s address and exchange of plaques to mark our linking with the Ugandan school.  After the speeches, the charities and NGOs will have stalls with literature and will answer individual questions which the students might have.

During the rest of the week (15 to 21 April), the teachers from Uganda will attend classes, observing and participating in lessons and activities with the students.  Both Joseph Matovu and Grace Nakuya are very excited about the whole experience.

Cian O’Mahony, Ted O’Sullivan, Rosanne O’Callaghan, Neil Bronks.

U16 A team

After having a very successful year in second year the school was upgraded to A level school. This was going to be a challenge for the school teams. First to play was the U16 team. The boys started a heavy training schedule training at 7.30-8.30 twice a week and on afternoons each week. The national league coach from Blue Demons offered to help with the trainings as his son Alex started to play with the school.

In our pool we played St Aidan’s and Crosshaven away. St Aidan’s game was the first of the session. The boys started badly, letting the opposition run in easy layups and take a substantial lead. In the second half Peter Mullane, Klaus Ozolins, Alex D’Alessio, Darragh Fleming and Kiran Chopra found their form and played solid defence. The baskets finally started to drop, in the end the team only lost by five points.

The Crosshaven game was a great defensive game. On offense we fought for every basket. Fast breaks then saw Darragh, Klaus, Alex, Kiran and Peter run in some easy scores. It was great to see dedicated players like Kevin O’Leary, Simone Alade and Robert O’Reilly getting some court time. Douglas won convincingly in the end.

After the pool the team qualified for the semi-final, where we had to travel to Ballincollig to face Colaiste Choilm. The team played well, playing strong defence and attacking well also, but Colaiste Choilm were too strong for our young side. The Douglas team never let themselves down with Peter Mullane putting in a very impressive performance.

U19 team

As we only had 4 players playing U19 this year we decided to play challenge matches and prepare for next year.
Our first challenge match was against Crosshaven, it was great to see Stephen Neville and David Barrett don a school jersey. Michael Keating had his greatest game ever for the school scoring from all angles and making some great steals. We hope to have a Blitz later in the year for these players.

Rosanne O’Callaghan

Seven of the schools athletes and coach Steven Macklin travelled to Italy to take part in the IAAF Cinque Mulini International Cross-Country at the end of January. The athletes took part in the youth 6km race for those born in 1993/1994 and raced to a superb team win, with 6 athletes finishing in the top 18. The races were held in the town of San Vittore Olona just outside Milan on a wonderful course. The course proved a big hit with the athletes with fast sections, small sharp banks and a trip through some old historic mills. The seven athletes took to the line in the youth 6km race in confidant fashion. The pace was very fast from the start and Patrick Coleman settled into the break away group of six athletes. He battled well throughout and was rewarded with a superb fourth place finish in 19.51, just six seconds from a podium place. Behing him the team had a great run, with Cullen Lynch and Ian Tobin having a wonderful last lap battle, eventually finishing ninth and tenth respectively. Mark Seacy had a fine run to come home in 13th and with other superb runs from Andrew O’Keeffe 15th, Jamie Sullivan 18th and Emmet Bracken 26th they easily won the team event. Well done to all the athletes, who had an experience I am sure that will stand to them for the World Schools Championships in April.

Steven Macklin

A group of 20 Transition Year students have just started a module in Web Design in the school. Run by four past pupils who are currently in University College Cork; the Douglas Community School students are learning how to write HTML code. They will each design their own webpage with pictures, links, music and videos. Watch this space, as we hope to post the best ones here! They will also have the opportunity to visit UCC to use the computer labs there, and to show their webpages to the head of the computer studies department.

The past pupils of Douglas Community School who are running these classes are Eoin Coakley, Niall Browne, Aaron Sammon and Conor Hodnett, who are all thoroughly enjoying their return to their alma mater. They feel that they would have greatly appreciated the opportunity to participate in a class like this when they were in Transition Year, and hope that the module may spark an interest in programming for some of the students involved. They hope to see some of our present Transition Years studying Business Information Systems (BIS) or Computer Science in UCC in the years to come!

For those interested in web design, a very useful website is: www.w3schools.com.

C Ó Conaill