Paul Wright | Schoolboy football needs serious changes

As the schoolboy football season winds down, the quality of the football on show is deteriorating.

Even so, the victory by Kingston College (KC) over Clarendon College (CC) in the final of the Champions Cup must rank as one of the greatest episodes of stick-to-itiveness and never-say-die attitude witnessed by the brave souls who went to the match and those who watched it on television.

KC were coming off a heartbreaking loss to arch-rivals Jamaica College (JC) in the semi-finals of the Manning Cup, coming out as the losers in the dreaded penalty shoot-out after no side was good enough to score the go-ahead goal after full time. One can only imagine the dressing room and time at school with fellow school and classmates, as they mulled over the loss and prepared for the final of the knockout tournament known as the Champions Cup.

Yet, Ludlow Bernard and his support staff at KC managed to keep tired and mentally devastated boys focused enough to take on and beat the best technical schoolboy team playing this year, CC.

Playing too much football

It is now established and recognised by everyone, including the authorities, Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA), that our children are playing too much football in the Christmas term of every year while still trying and struggling to fulfil the main reason for school, getting a rounded education where academics, sport, and other extracurricular activities compete to ensure that our children leave school with the necessary tools to make a positive contribution to the adult world that is (today) unforgiving and fiercely competitive.

A little-known fact is that there are more schools qualified for schoolboy football than currently competing, making the present nightmare of scheduling of matches potentially worse if and when these schools apply to join the present unwieldy number of entrants. This fact, coupled with the inevitable postponement of games because of weather and other considerations that prevail in the relatively short Christmas term every year, ensures that some schools are ‘forced’ to play three or sometimes more games in a week!

The plan to assist in making football for children less stressful and more ‘fun’ would be to divide the competing schools into two divisions based on performance in the year and arrange a promotion and demotion strategy that would have the best teams playing against each other, thus improving their technical nous and skill. This is the strategy articulated by FIFA now that the Nations Cup League B, where our Reggae Boyz demolished the competition and have now qualified for competition against ‘better’ teams in League A.

The only drawback to a first and second division in schoolboy football is the fear that some schools (and headmasters) would lose revenue. Apparently, the gate receipts and potential earning capacity of a school that, because of a lack of quality footballers, would not be able to attract an audience of fans when a brand-name school with ‘better’ footballers come to play, is enough to ensure that the present scenario prevails.

Thus, the education and mental and physical health of young Jamaicans are sacrificed on the altar of revenue. This is intolerable, and while we congratulate and bask in the glory that these boys from KC have brought to themselves, their school, and their supporters, let us all, in one accord, insist that ISSA adjusts the Manning and daCosta cups (and their spin-off competitions) to reduce the number of games that some schools play, thereby reducing the stress and possible deleterious scholastic effects of too much football in a short period of time.

STRESS ON STUDENTS

The stress on these children is manifested in the frequency of injuries and now bizarre behaviour when the spectre of defeat looms. Pre-participation evaluation is rapidly gaining traction among some schools, only after children began collapsing and dying on the field of play. I do hope that ISSA will not wait until the death of a child before agreeing to adjust the number of games played in a short period of time by our children at play. The writing is already on the wall regarding the physical and behavioural changes we are seeing in our children. The health and welfare of our children must take priority over the potential financial windfall that school sports gives to ISSA.