Let's consider a rotation policy for schoolboy footballers

Saturday, December 10, 2011

THE annual schoolboy football season comes to an end today with the final leg of the all-island Olivier Shield involving those two wonderful educational institutions, St George's College and Rusea's High.

We are told by Mr George Forbes, competitions director for Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) — that admirable organisation of school principals that has run Jamaican school sports for the past century — the season has been "very successful".

Much of that success, we are told, had to do with good weather, which meant the need to reschedule games was minimised. Thankfully, the hurricane season went by uneventfully and in the traditional wet months of September and October there was relatively moderate weather compared to some schoolboy football seasons past.

Also, we are told, crowd behaviour at games across the island was quite good, part of what we perceive to be a general trend in local football.

Not everything was hunky dory. In terms of coaching, for example, there is a sense that some schools still fall short in the tactical and technical guidance being received. Yet, we recognise that there has been great improvement down the years with minimum coaching standards now in place for schoolboy football.

A peeve we have consistently had in this space relates to the quality of the playing surfaces. In the tough economic environment, it's understandable that proper playfields for our children and young people won't come very high on the priority list. And yet we believe that much more could be done if all stakeholders, including school administrators, develop an understanding of how important good surfaces are to the grooming of young talent.

In simple, stark terms it's not possible to have good football on bad surfaces. Unfortunately, there are too many of the latter in Jamaican football.

Another area of major concern for this newspaper relates to the workload for our schoolboy footballers. We are pleased that in the urban competition, the Manning Cup, there was a real effort to ease the schedule with re-jigging of the competition, allowing games to be played three to five days apart.

In the rural area daCosta Cup there remains far too heavy a workload, and we are happy that Mr Forbes has gone on record as saying efforts will also be made next season to ease the scheduling.

We feel also there is a strong case to be made for greater rotation of players. All too often we find the pressure to win at all costs has led coaches to field their top players in virtually every game. The truth is that, in some cases, coaches overwork their players against their better judgement — falling victim to the extreme pressure exerted by supporters and the school community.

The time may well be ripe for ISSA to develop a compulsory player rotation policy. We see no reason why this can't be done, bearing in mind that, for example, ISSA currently mandates minimum academic standards for eligibility to its competitions.

We feel confident that ISSA will, at the very least, contemplate our suggestion as it continues its exemplary role in nurturing young Jamaican sporting talent.

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Let's consider a rotation policy for schoolboy footballers