BASKETBALL - Academy balances books and sport

VICKY-JO HEMARA plays basketball for fun but she's deadly serious about playing soccer and enrolling in the high performance centre at Kamo High School, which has helped her find some harmony at school.
Hemara was considering leaving school after a bleak Year 11 experience but was lucky enough to be one of the first to enrol in the new centre this year.
"Last year was my first year at Kamo High School and it was really full on," she said.
"With NCEA and soccer training down in Auckland twice every week, I was stressing out but this year [with the academy] everything is balancing itself out nicely."
Hemara said she would have seriously considered leaving school at the end of this year to concentrate on her sport but after being accepted into the high performance academy, she now plans another year at school.
"I'm really enjoying it because I can concentrate on soccer while staying at school," the Year 12 student said.
Hemara is one of the young crop of players in the champion North Force squad and she has already been approved as one of the High Performance students for next year.
After success in their first year, KHS will go one step further and start specific soccer and hockey academies at the school next year.
The students take High Performance as a sixth subject - with an hour-long class every day, that can be used to catch up on school work, training or indeed anything approved by KHS high performance manager Marianne Budd.
Budd said the programme was started to stop kids choosing sport over school, which is a choice that many young sportspeople make.
"We found that a lot of students were facing a clash of their sporting programme with their academic programme ... so we worked out a programme that could promote some harmony between their academic work and their sport," Budd said.
The programme is open to senior students whose application is supported by their sports coach and their parents.
The student must be competing at either a national or regional level but the catch is they must be academically up to scratch.
"All of our programmes require that the participants must be consistently high in their academic effort, that doesn't necessarily mean [a high level of] achievement but the way they approach their studies says a lot about an athlete in terms of commitment, motivation and dedication," Budd said.
Budd's job is to make sure that if a student is absent during term for training or competition, then their assessments and classwork are brought up to date.
The programme also supplies strength and conditioning programmes for students as well as sports nutrition and sports psychology.