Tweet
Lance Neita, Contributor
The 2010 schoolboy football season is on fire with almost every secondary or high school in Jamaica involved in the daCosta Cup or Manning Cup competition. No school wants to be left out and the media are giving full coverage to the extravaganza played out nightly on television or daily in the newspapers.
Schoolboy football in Jamaica has a fan club stretching from Negril to Port Morant and generating thrills and excitement for students, old boys, teachers, parents, home towns and even the international community.
For those who love football, it is a good time to be in Jamaica, with Saturday afternoons or mid-week days booked for engaging in full-time play and solid entertainment.
There is also a positive spin-off for the thriving casual economy with sidewalk vendors exultant at the opportunity to cash in on the captive sideline market, while bus and taxi drivers enjoy the after-school business traffic.
Schoolboy football is fun and has captured the attention and imagination of the entire country. The behaviour of the fans and the players is sometimes unseemly, and school administrations have to be on their toes to cap and control the exuberance which sometimes lead to unruly and even violent displays.
Minimal disruptions
With our level of national indiscipline, it remains a marvel and a credit to those in charge that we can roll out an islandwide spectacle of this sort each year with minimum disruption and misbehaviour.
Football, and sports in general, is now such an important, albeit unofficial, part of the school curriculum that perhaps it is time to introduce a code of conduct into the sports training of our students, emphasising character development, sportsmanship and the resultant discipline as mandatory to participation in any of these events.
Football has its own rules and standards and penalties, but if at the end of the season the star player remains locked in the parochial confinement of the game and does not emerge a better person in terms of character, behaviour, leadership and all the values that make him a better citizen, then we have lost it.
This is not wishful thinking. I have seen it work in the child-development projects organised by companies like Kaiser, Noranda, Alpart, Jamalco and Windalco, where sportsmanship, role model behaviour and discipline share equal prominence with the skills-training curriculum in football, netball, cricket and other sports attached to their summer camp programmes.
The first rule of football, however, should be to have fun, and there are many hilarious stories about schoolboy football to be told. I can recall a Munro-Cornwall final at Munro in 1962 when JBC radio, conducting a live broadcast of schoolboy football in the rural areas for perhaps the first time, went silent in the final seconds when veteran sportscaster Roy Lawrence, a Munro Old Boy, threw away the mike and dashed on to the field to celebrate the winning goal.
But my favourite is the apocryphal story of the St George's forward who scored the winning goal against KC in the dying moments of a hard-fought game. He was lifted off the field and declared a hero forever, but there was one small problem - he knew that he had handled the ball.
He went on to enjoy an outstanding career as a doctor, church leader, outstanding citizen, but the nagging, guilty feeling stayed with him for life.
He died and went to heaven, and, to his surprise, was met with a warm welcome by the man at the pearly gates. "Come in, come in," gushed the gatekeeper, "we have been waiting for you."
"But I have one thing to confess," said our footballer, "and I must clear my conscience."
"Oh," said the man rustling the keys impatiently, "you mean that little thing with the football match. Don't let it worry you, you just hurry and come in.
"And by the way," he confided to the reluctant traveller as he passed through the gates, "I am not St Peter. It's St Peter's day off. I am St George."
Lance Neita is a public relations professional and communications consultant. Comments may be sent to [email protected] or [email protected].
The 2010 schoolboy football season is on fire with almost every secondary or high school in Jamaica involved in the daCosta Cup or Manning Cup competition. No school wants to be left out and the media are giving full coverage to the extravaganza played out nightly on television or daily in the newspapers.
Schoolboy football in Jamaica has a fan club stretching from Negril to Port Morant and generating thrills and excitement for students, old boys, teachers, parents, home towns and even the international community.
For those who love football, it is a good time to be in Jamaica, with Saturday afternoons or mid-week days booked for engaging in full-time play and solid entertainment.
There is also a positive spin-off for the thriving casual economy with sidewalk vendors exultant at the opportunity to cash in on the captive sideline market, while bus and taxi drivers enjoy the after-school business traffic.
Schoolboy football is fun and has captured the attention and imagination of the entire country. The behaviour of the fans and the players is sometimes unseemly, and school administrations have to be on their toes to cap and control the exuberance which sometimes lead to unruly and even violent displays.
Minimal disruptions
With our level of national indiscipline, it remains a marvel and a credit to those in charge that we can roll out an islandwide spectacle of this sort each year with minimum disruption and misbehaviour.
Football, and sports in general, is now such an important, albeit unofficial, part of the school curriculum that perhaps it is time to introduce a code of conduct into the sports training of our students, emphasising character development, sportsmanship and the resultant discipline as mandatory to participation in any of these events.
Football has its own rules and standards and penalties, but if at the end of the season the star player remains locked in the parochial confinement of the game and does not emerge a better person in terms of character, behaviour, leadership and all the values that make him a better citizen, then we have lost it.
This is not wishful thinking. I have seen it work in the child-development projects organised by companies like Kaiser, Noranda, Alpart, Jamalco and Windalco, where sportsmanship, role model behaviour and discipline share equal prominence with the skills-training curriculum in football, netball, cricket and other sports attached to their summer camp programmes.
The first rule of football, however, should be to have fun, and there are many hilarious stories about schoolboy football to be told. I can recall a Munro-Cornwall final at Munro in 1962 when JBC radio, conducting a live broadcast of schoolboy football in the rural areas for perhaps the first time, went silent in the final seconds when veteran sportscaster Roy Lawrence, a Munro Old Boy, threw away the mike and dashed on to the field to celebrate the winning goal.
But my favourite is the apocryphal story of the St George's forward who scored the winning goal against KC in the dying moments of a hard-fought game. He was lifted off the field and declared a hero forever, but there was one small problem - he knew that he had handled the ball.
He went on to enjoy an outstanding career as a doctor, church leader, outstanding citizen, but the nagging, guilty feeling stayed with him for life.
He died and went to heaven, and, to his surprise, was met with a warm welcome by the man at the pearly gates. "Come in, come in," gushed the gatekeeper, "we have been waiting for you."
"But I have one thing to confess," said our footballer, "and I must clear my conscience."
"Oh," said the man rustling the keys impatiently, "you mean that little thing with the football match. Don't let it worry you, you just hurry and come in.
"And by the way," he confided to the reluctant traveller as he passed through the gates, "I am not St Peter. It's St Peter's day off. I am St George."
Lance Neita is a public relations professional and communications consultant. Comments may be sent to [email protected] or [email protected].