By: Cindy Khoo
“When you were a child,” my mother recounted with much pride, “You could do frog jumps up a long flight of stairs in the park with no trouble, but the boys struggled.”
“My girl has strong legs! Maybe she’ll be a sprinter. A high-jumper. Ooh, maybe a basketball player!” my mother thought. Alas, since impressing my mother with my powerful thigh muscles, my achievements in sports can only be considered dismal. As it turned out, I merely had a higher tolerance for pain, but otherwise had no more ball sense or patience for training than any other ordinary girl.
10 years ago, sports was something additional to our report card, something extra we did to ensure that we were healthy. But today, youngsters with an interest in sports could potentially ask themselves, “Do I want to take this further?” I look with envy at a new venue for individual development of this generation, namely the Singapore Sport School.
The Singapore Sports School was officially opened in 2004, becoming the first school in Singapore that provides a specialized training environment for young athletes. The school currently specializes in badminton, bowling, football, netball, sailing, swimming, table tennis, and track and field.
It is a sad fact of this country that we live in a very demanding academic environment, where children are judged by the schools they go to and the number of ‘A’s they score. One might remember leaders expounding on the need for a balanced lifestyle, and for our youngsters to be equally involved in extra-curricular activities so they may show their leadership qualities and develop skills and abilities outside of a classroom.
At some point, someone had a bright idea and said, hey guess what, let’s allocate points to the extra-curricular activities, so we could tell the good ones from the bad, like which would in fact involve “leadership qualities” and “skills and abilities outside of a classroom.” And with that, one has one additional A to score – in extra curricular activities.
Suppose now, however, you love sports. You have a talent for it, but your school much rather you spend your time studying, because ultimately it’s the examinations that really count. Besides, even if you could win medals for the school, your medals will not help you get a job when you fail to graduate from university.
It is the reality that many young talented athletes have therefore been persuaded to give up on their sports. To address this inevitable loss of athletic talent to a rational preference for the academic path, the Singapore government therefore set up the Singapore Sport School, where students can be trained on a special programme that would allow focus on sports as well as maintain certain standards in academic results.
Singapore Sports School positions itself as the place “where Singapore’s future sporting champions are groomed.” But I don’t see it that way. I see it as the place where champion dreams are realized, because you can now put your heart hundred per cent into it.
At the Sports School, students live on campus five days a week, and begin each day with a training session at six in the morning. After they go through lessons based on mainstream school curricula, they have another training session in late afternoon. Night time is spent on their studies again, and then off to bed they go at half past ten.
Do you have the discipline to go through such a structured and some say boring lifestyle? How far would you go, in sacrificing your personal time and space, to realize your dreams?
If you want to be a winner, you’d have to put in the effort, and the school is the structure that lends you the framework for development. If you can enter this school, you have proven yourself to be one of the top young athletic talents of the country, and no man in the street should think any less of you, than of a student in a top academic school.
I am optimistic for children of the Sports School, because at the very least they are given a shot at developing their talent to the fullest possible. There’s no guarantee that they would indeed be champions of their sport, but at the least they would have challenged themselves and one day say with pride, “I tried.” And not “I didn’t, because I needed to study.”
I could have been a sprinter. A high-jumper. Or a basketball player. But at the end of the day, I wasn’t because I knew it was not where my true interests laid. But certainly if I had dreamt even the tiniest bit of becoming a champion, I know I would have wanted to explore it further than I had. Since last year, for children of today’s Singapore, they now have the precious option of dreaming just that little bit closer to reality. 
Cindy is a Halfway Staff Writer