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StEths youth a break Javelin record with every throw....63mplus
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Lots of Trini's Grenadians and Bahamians talking with admiration on champs.....
holmwood hair styles...! Strange Vere not dominating ladies.....Comment
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PETA Gay Williams.. St Jago.... Two golds with a bruk arm.. In a yellow cast....
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Hughes of KC not running 200....
STETHs ahead of MC at champs rarely happens....Comment
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Hamilton win the 800 1500 double for Calabar.... Class 1....
No body else naw watch.....??..??
My streaming is ratty....Comment
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i saw the video of Javon Francis ,and other updates on FB..other than that no, not really watching
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Mine blowing Jonielle Smith 200m....terrible technique though.Cameron of Edwin Allen...was a better runner...Comment
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The big one 200m... OHara vs Francis.....O'HaraComment
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And Minzie of Bog walk..win. Was silver in 100. Javon injured....Manley... OHara third...
Francis and O'Hara Are world youth Champion.... Javon is a silver world champion....Donkey Man.....but they got beat...
Pity Hughes wasn't in it...Comment
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Purple people get quiet.
7/5th of all people do not understand fractions.Comment
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Lol no man mi still down with the purple blood for life
QUOTE=Pepper;777222]Purple people get quiet.[/QUOTE]
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eeh heeh!Comment
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Fast Feet Mustn't Push Out Quick Thinkers
Published: Monday | March 31, 20140 Comments
Lascelve Graham, Guest Columnist
Lascelve Graham, Guest Columnist
Although Keith Noel, former St Jago High principal, concluded differently in his recent article (16/3/14), it is because I read The Gleaner that I was made aware of the "10-13" sports transferees who were not allowed to participate for St Jago at Champs 2012. Focusing on whether it was 11 or 13 athletes involved is majoring in the minor. The point that this and a number of other incidents confirm is that transfers for sports purposes by our high schools continue unabated. The ISSA rules have proven ineffective and a dismal failure. The St Jago sports transferees were unable to compete simply because of the gross incompetence and negligence of the St Jago authorities.
According to Mr Noel, "In some (long) years past, it was discovered that an ugly practice had developed in a few high schools where youngsters who were not qualified for ... high school were 'recruited' into those schools primarily to represent them at football (and to a much lesser extent, track and field). The many rules have brought an end to this practice.
"Rules ... were put in place to prevent the 'pirating' of students with sports talent by schools with ambitions to win at football, cricket or track and field that would lure these students from institutions with fledgling programmes."
educators won't face facts
For Mr Noel to write the above and assert that ISSA's approach is effective suggests strongly why education is moving forward at such a snail's pace. Too many of our renowned educators have their heads in the clouds. They just refuse to face the facts!
The practice is very much alive and well! Friends of mine who are in the business of teaching literacy tell of a number of instances where they have been asked by prestigious high schools to teach semi-literate youngsters brought into the school because of their sports ability. Teachers and a number of principals complain regularly, though quietly and in private, about the practice.
In one Gleaner article, a coach lamented that the playing field was not level, and for coaches like himself, "it's an endless struggle to keep his programme afloat, as he staves off rabid recruiters".
We need to be fair and consistent, especially in our situation where there is a paucity of quality education. We cannot be keeping out some children from high school based on academic requirements but letting in others whose academic performance may be worse than those we are keeping out.
What Mr Noel is proposing is that if a child is academically deficient, he/she should be allowed into a school of very high academic grades because that student is good at sports. Is this fair to the many students who have been kept out through GSAT because their grades were not competitive? Isn't this a double standard?
hard-working inner-city students
What about the poor, struggling, voiceless student from the inner city who has worked hard, as we tell them to do, to get the grades that would earn a coveted place at school but is kept out by somebody brought in because of sports ability, although not having the academic grades to merit placement? Does that parent have any rights?
What about the very competent coaches, trained by G.C. Foster College and scattered in almost every nook and cranny of Jamaica, who discover and nurture these outstanding athletes hoping for some deserved glory and recognition for themselves and their schools, only to have their charges snatched from them and claimed by others as soon as they come to prominence?
Brilliant man of the arts that he is, Mr Noel conjures up a scenario in which parents are the all powerful, domineering, driving force, activists in education, and the poor, passive, reactive principals are hapless, helpless victims. Of course, this is a farce fashioned by the very creative and imaginative mind of Mr Noel. Oftentimes it is the principals, the coaches, alumni and their acolytes who provide the impetus, the energy for sports recruiting by high schools.
Mr Noel obviously prefers to discriminate against and penalise those students who do not have a sports skill as he uses criteria usually reserved for sports academies and clubs to determine entry to high schools with their limited spaces.
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every single Calabar and edwin allen athelete are there on the basis of their academics! Right
I am a fan of champs but this is very very dangerous.... as it will undermine tthe not so succesful schools
Schools are schools we are in danger of evolving them into sports clubs.....Comment
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this is what the world sees...
South Africa could learn from the Jamaicans
Ross Tucker | 31 March, 2014 06:170 Comments
Usain Bolt at a signing for his book "Faster Than Lightning: My Autobiography"
Image by: Gabriel Olsen / Getty Images
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JAMAICA'S National High School Track and Field Championships, known to locals simply as "Champs", is an event that, understandably, barely registers a blip on the Richter Scale of most South Africans. But for those involved in track and field, it's a seismic event.
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For it is at this five-day sports event that 40000 wildly enthusiastic spectators cram into a 35000-seater stadium to get a first glimpse of their future Olympic champions.
"Champs" is Jamaica's largest sports event by some distance, and is one of the primary vehicles through which this relatively tiny island has delivered the sprinting dominance most of us recognise in Usain Bolt, Yohan Blake and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
The relevance of "Champs" for those outside athletics is that it demonstrates the three key requirements for elite athlete development. They are: aspiration or imitation; selection; and viability. It is these three boxes that must be ticked in order to produce world-class sporting talent. Where nations or teams have failed, it is because one or more of these boxes has not been checked.
Aspiration is what binds Indian cricket, South African rugby, Spanish clay court tennis and Jamaican sprinting. It is that intangible quality that allows children to see, rather than imagine, what is possible and compels them to pursue the training required to get there. When Usain Bolt or Asafa Powell attend the finals of the 100m races at "Champs" to hand over the medals, they make a lasting contribution to the desire of those athletes to persist and succeed.
Children are masterful imitators and so, provided there is access to those role models (usually TV for widest impact), there is scope to develop the next Tendulkar or Nadal.
Selection is box number two. It makes no elite-performance sense for thousands of children to play a sport if there is no way to identify and select them into teams, where those who are best-endowed and most-skilled can excel. Competitive systems like the Jamaican school championships provide exposure to competition, and the sport's equivalent of "survival of the fittest" drives the progressive emergence of the very best.
This selection and competition process is one of South Africa's great rugby advantages. Driven by competitive schools, and funnelled through Craven Weeks, we benefit enormously from the constant competition that ultimately reveals the top 50 players who will go on to earn professional contracts and enter the Springbok selection pool each year. SA football, on the other hand, lacks this advantage.
The final box is viability. If a nation is asking an athlete to pursue a career in a sport, then it has to make that career choice viable. As much as we want to do it for the love of the game, this is not a realistic ideal when the rest of the world has professional sport. An 18-year-old stands at the crossroads of his or her life and, in one direction, lies future study and a possible career as a dentist, lawyer, accountant.
If we want them to go in the other direction then we must provide support that at least ensures they are not liabilities to someone else (usually family). This rarely happens for sports other than cricket and rugby in SA and one shudders to think how many world-class athletes have aspired to achievement, been selected, and then fallen because "real life" gets in the way.
"Champs" may be a Jamaican affair but it's a great demonstration of the confluence of elite performance factors. These three factors are always delivered by people - the coaches, teachers and administrators - who facilitate the discovery of the next Usain Bolt, rather than stand in the way. Where glimmers of sporting success are stillborn, as happens so often in our Olympic sporting codes, look no further than "Champs" for the reasons.
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