By Nishka P, Year 10

On 28th June, four of us were lucky enough to attend the Apex cricket festival held at Millfield school in Somerset as part of the GDST national representative team.

This was an amazing opportunity for us to play against high level opponents and share our love for the game. After arriving on Sunday, we had an interesting talk from Tom Scollay about mindset both in and out of sport followed by a short speech from Andrew Strauss, former England cricket captain.

The tournament consisted of three round robin games in the group stages in which we played against London Schools, Mayfield and Scarborough. Sadly, we lost our first match against London Schools but came back strong to beat Mayfield by 82 runs. Our last match in the group stage was against Scarborough College and thanks to an all-round great performance, we managed to secure a win beating them by 46 runs.

Throughout the tournament between games, Apex provided all the participants with masterclasses in fielding, batting, spin bowling and fast bowling. At one point I found myself facing throw downs from Andrew Strauss.

Having finished second in our group with 2 wins from 3, we headed into a 3rd place playoff match against Invicta. We were all extra determined to execute all the skills we had learned over the 3 days and perform well for ourselves and our team wanting to come away with a top 3 finish. I’m glad to report we won the playoff by 18 runs finishing in 3rd place. As a bonus for our families who could not come to watch, all our matches were live streamed on YouTube.

We all had an incredible few days of cricket, learning and honing our skills as well as making new friends from the GDST community.