The ninth running of School Sport Australia’s flagship event, being staged in Adelaide this week, seeks to provide international competition opportunities for school-age children.

First held in Brisbane in 1982 as a lead-in to the Commonwealth Games, Australia’s largest international school sporting event has since grown from 2187 participants to more than 5000.

It seeks to continue a proud record of having launched world-beating careers.

The swimming competition of this year’s event is being staged in a pool named after 13-time Paralympic champion Matt Cowdrey.

‘‘The Pacific School Games was a great preparation ground that set me up for the rest of my career,’’ Cowdrey said.

The eight other sports being contested are baseball, basketball, diving, soccer, table tennis, touch football, softball and goalball – a team sport designed for blind athletes.

Every Australian state and territory is represented, along with visitors from Cambodia, China, Fiji, Macau, New Zealand, India and Pakistan, the last two  testing the geographic accuracy of the event’s title.

The result is a colourful cosmopolitan coming together of young athletes from a diverse background, including a Cambodian team consisting of just four table tennis players compared with a NSW team that needed a page and a half in the program just for its swimming component.

Tasmania has sent teams of 54 competitors in swimming and 27 in touch football.

Just like an Olympic or Commonwealth games, the Pacific School Games (PSG) feature not just multiple sports but numerous venues, an army of willing volunteers  in colourful shirts and an excuse to charge $50 for a beach towel or $20 for a mug.

The evolution of the PSG mascots has provided stiff competition for Wenlock and Mandeville, the weird one-eyed mascots who scared small children at the London Olympics.

Previous PSG mascots have been called Clammy and even Weedy  and named after dragons, bunyips and seadragons. This year’s offering appears to be some strange Martian dude with a leaf for a head. He’s called Matey, so must have come in peace. 

The PSG has not been held since 2008 as it was considered unviable following the global financial crisis.

However, its return comes under a new structure that seeks to make it viable enough to be held every two years instead of four.

Reusing much of the Cricket World Cup regalia with an image of Matey stuck on it was a particularly frugal way to start.

And as a parent who has financed the entry of one competitor, I can testify to the huge monetary injection the PSG is enjoying ($210 just to watch).

But as Cowdrey and Olympians Natalie Titcume (softball), Carl Veart (soccer) and Ben Wigmore (baseball) attest in the glossy Games guide ($10, but at least that is now tax-deductible), the PSG can be a springboard to almost any sporting ambition.

In fact, the sky really is the limit if you read School Sport Australia executive officer Brad Allen’s guide profile, which reveals that his all-time dream is ‘‘To learn to fly’’.