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25 August 2020 | Story Thabo Kessah | Photo Supplied
Nicole Morris champions leadership development in her role as Director: Student Affairs.
She describes herself as passionate about leadership development in Africa and constantly seeking new ways of developing and nurturing talent. Her current role as Secretary-General of the National Association of Student Development (NASDEV) bears testimony to this. Closer to home, she is the Director: Student Affairs, having joined the Qwaqwa Campus just as COVID-19 was about to hit South Africa and the entire globe. During August, she hosted, among other things, a Women’s Month Webinar Series that focused on the theme of Intersectionality Between Politics, Feminism and Social Justice, and featured Pilani Bubu, South African Music Awards Winner of Best African Adult Contemporary Album in 2020. 

She was previously the Manager: Development and Leadership Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. 
Meet Nicole Morris.

Please tell us about yourself: Who you are and what you do.

My name is Nicole Morris – a daughter, friend, traveller, seeker of knowledge, and trailblazer.

Is there a woman who inspires you and who you would like to celebrate this Women’s Month, and why?

My mother – a phenomenal beauty who did not allow any challenge to repress her infectious laughter and her search for beauty and progress through any and all entrepreneurial ventures.

What are some of the challenges you have faced in your life that have made you a better woman?

Fear! The fear of failure, the fear of succeeding! Fear, fear, fear! And then realising that fear is nothing, but False Evidence Appearing Real! Now, having learnt to feel the fear and doing my thing, has anyway liberated me. 

What advice would you give to the 15-year-old you?

It is OK to not fit in, it is OK to ask questions, and it is definitely OK to want more.  What is important, is to know that you are always living your truth.

What would you say makes you a champion woman [of the UFS]?

An irrepressible ability and desire to find solutions to challenges big and small, and smiling and laughing throughout the journey.  

Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us; some people and experiences ignite them, and some dampen them. Each of us has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live; the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its [the soul's] food.

 


News Archive

Three more Kovsie staff members involved in Olympic Games
2012-05-30

 

Dr Derik Coetzee
Photo: Supplied
30 May 2012

The South African men’s hockey team will practice on our Bloemfontein Campus from 28 May to 8 June 2012, and the team count on the assistance of three Kovsies to prepare them for the Olympic Games taking place in London later this year.  

Dr Derik Coetzee, senior lecturer in the Department of Exercise and Sport Science and Head of our High Performance Centre, has been appointed conditioning coach of the team. He will be assisted by Colleen Jones and Riaan Schoeman, also from this department.

The UFS team and Mr Gregg Clark, the team’s coach, will work out a periodisation programme for the team, which will continue until the hockey finals at the Olympic Games. The programme includes the correct exercises, volume, intensity and number of exercise sessions per week.

This is not the first time that Dr Coetzee has assisted sports teams to prepare for important events. In 2007, he was the conditioning coach of the Springbok rugby team that won the World Cup in France. He was also the conditioning coach of the under-21 Springbok team in 2002 that won the Junior World Cup Tournament. 

Dr Coetzee says it is a challenge to ensure that the team performs well at the Olympic Games. “The joy on the faces of the coach and players when they qualified in Japan cannot be described because many people thought they would not qualify.”

With the addition of Dr Coetzee, Ms Jones and Mr Schoeman, a total of six staff members from the UFS will be involved with the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games. The other three are:

  • Dr Louis Holtzhausen, Head of the university’s Department of Sports and Exercise Medicine, has been selected as team doctor for the more than 300 athletes that will represent South Africa at this year’s Olympic Games (in London).
  • Ms Ebeth Grobbelaar, Assistant Director of the South African Testing Laboratory for Prohibited Substances at the UFS, was invited to be involved in the Drugs Control Centre in the unit against prohibited substances which will test sportsmen and -women during the games.
  • Ms Hetsie Veitch, Head of the Unit for Students with Disabilities, has been invited to be a member of the Classification Panel at the final USA Paralympic athletics trials.

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