Busy year for Jamaica’s ice hockey

The Jamaica Olympic Ice Hockey Federation has confirmed that the senior men’s team will be playing in the Challenger Series of three tournaments April to July 2024.

This series involves round robin matches against Puerto Rico and Lebanon, who already have confirmed their participation. Greece is likely to be added to this list of countries.

The first set of matches will take place in Chicago April 18 to 21 and Jamaica will be fielding a full-strength team from its roster of some 80 eligible persons of Jamaican descent in North America and Europe.

The series moves to New York in June with matches scheduled July 5 to 9 and culminates in Toronto July 11-14.

The team, which started playing competitively in 2019, has an enviable record of 12 wins and 2 losses.

Prior to 2023, the team had played 11 consecutive games unbeaten, first winning the LATAM Cup in Fort Lauderdale in 2019 and beating teams like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, defending champions Colombia and Puerto Rico. Like Jamaica, all these teams are associate members of the International Federation.

VIBRANT LOCAL PROGRAMME

In the 2021 LATAM cup, Jamaica, having convincingly beaten all these teams two years earlier, was considered to be too strong for the opposing teams and were forced to play as an Exhibition team. In that tournament, the team repeated victories against these same teams, and added Lebanon, in the process of scoring 58 goals and conceding only seven.

Both of the losses were in a very competitive series against Puerto Rico in the inaugural annual tournament held last year in New York. PR won that series 2-1, the first time PR had beaten Jamaica. Jamaica is now 3-2 head-to-head with PR, having beaten them convincingly in the LATAM cups in 2019 and 2021.

Don Anderson, president of the federation, who was part of the initial launch of the bobsled journey in 1988 while still a vice president of the JOA, feels that this team is on the same path of capturing the hearts of ice hockey lovers across the world and enhancing Jamaica’s very strong sports reputation globally.

Jamaica now has a vibrant local programme involving some 50 youngsters aged 8-15 years and just completed filming a documentary with 28 of them at the GC Foster College. The documentary will be aired to the public soon. A number of semesters in the basics of the sport has already been completed at the college with the assistance of tutors from the IIHF.

Jamaica will again be represented at the Annual Congress of the IIHF in Prague in May, having previously attended congresses in Bratislava, and Tampere, Finland.