Ceremonies in Christchurch and Auckland celebrated the athletes, coaches, officials and support staff who received Prime Minister’s Scholarships in 2023.
They were the first ceremonies held since 2019 due to a COVID-19 induced hiatus.
MP for Christchurch East, Hon. Poto Williams, standing in for Minister for Sport and Recreation Grant Robertson, presented the scholarship certificates at the Christchurch event last week, with Deputy Prime Minister Carmel Sepuloni doing the honours in Auckland last night.
A total of 444 Prime Minister’s Scholarships were awarded in 2023 with almost 80% going to athletes and the remainder for coaches, officials and support staff.
The scholarship programme was established in 2000 to allow high performance athletes to undertake tertiary study and vocational qualifications while pursuing their sporting goals.
Unique to New Zealand, the scholarships are an important investment in the lives and wellbeing of high performance athletes, and in their future career development.
This year’s athlete recipients are using their scholarships to take on an incredibly wide collection of professional and educational opportunities in subjects as diverse as electrical engineering, psychology, land and property evaluation, medicine, business administration, food science and even speech and language pathology.
At the Christchurch event an athlete panel took centre stage to provide some insights into the Prime Minister’s Scholarships programme with a Q&A session hosted by MC Anna Simcic. The panel was made up of Paralympian and PM Athlete Scholarship recipient William Stedman, Paralympian and PM Scholarship Athlete Internship participant Anna Grimaldi and PM Gold Scholarship recipient (for recently retired athletes) Janina Kuzma.
Check out what they had to say in this video.
You can read more about how retired Snow Sports athlete Janina is using her Gold Scholarship in this case study.
This year’s ceremony was also the first opportunity to celebrate the success of the new Prime Minister’s Scholarship Athlete Internship programme.
This video, features some of the participants and their internship employers, telling the story of the internship programme.
The final ceremony for 2023 will be held in the Waikato on Tuesday 3 October.
