Developing Champs - ISSA president calls for more development meets in the build-up to Championships

With a tentative schedule for the 2021 ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships (Champs) now in place, ISSA President Keith Wellington says that they are hoping to increase the number of development meets in the lead-up to the competition.

As reported by The Gleaner yesterday, ISSA has prepared a draft, which shows the competition being held over five days from March 23 to 27, with a provision for an alternate date of May 4-8 should a spike in COVID-19 cases occurs around the initial March target date.

“We are hoping that we will have more meets than normal, because we don’t expect the normal numbers that would attend a particular meet to be the same. So, where we normally had 1,500 to 2,000 persons participating in a meet, you may find that is going to be reduced to seven or eight hundred,” Wellington told The Gleaner.

The 2020 edition of Champs was cancelled after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the island. The continued local spread of the virus led to the cancellation of the 2019-20 junior athletic season.

High-school competition recently returned after 10 months of inactivity, with the staging of the Tyser Mills Classic on the grounds of Calabar High School on December 12 and Wellington is hoping to see more opportunities for high-school athletes to compete in the coming weeks

“What we would want now, is to see on any given weekend, four or five different meets being held rather than two or three,” Wellington noted.

Wellington, who went to length to emphasise the importance of ensuring that the development meets were staged safely, noting that this will have a domino effect on Champs, pointed to the Tyser Miller Classic as a blueprint for meet organisers, given the current health and safety requirements.

“We are hopeful that we can build what we learnt from that meet going into the development season, because while we are planning for Champs, you have to be mindful that the lead-up to Champs is just as important, because obviously, if something goes wrong there, it is going to affect what we do at Champs,” Wellington said.

Meanwhile, head coach of the Hydel High School track and field team, Corey Bennett, suggested having a grading scale to evaluate how meets are executed in 2021 in the lead-up to Champs, in order to perfect protocols in time for the marquee event.

“I believe that if you start at a ‘C’, then there are things that we can do differently so that the next meet can go to a C+ then to a B+. So by the time we get to Champs, we would probably get an ‘A’ in how we want to operate,” Bennett said. “I think persons should be open to ideas, open to suggestions, and open to criticism.”