Camperdown look to make amends

AFTER BEING booted from the Manning Cup competition last year, Camperdown High School’s football coach, Donovan Lofters, said his team has moved past that setback and is ready to give it their all this season.

“It took us a week to get over that. (Still) we have it at the edge of our minds that we need to do better because that disappointed a lot of people last year. But it’s a new year and we have to focus on the new year,” Lofters said.

The team was set to move on to the round of 16, but their progression was halted because of the use of an ineligible player, according to the rules of the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA).

“He shouldn’t have played based on the rules, but he wasn’t overaged. I am just clarifying that because people keep on telling me that I used overaged players,” the coach said.

For the 2022 season, Lofters said his team is confident that they will do better this time around.

“We are contenders because we are playing good football, so let’s see how far it goes this time,” he said.

Camperdown also won the 2022 staging of the recent Ali Cole Cup hosted by Excelsior High School, showing the team’s physical readiness. However, Lofters said that the players’ mental preparedness is something he is still working on.

“The confidence is high, which can be very dangerous too because the players will think they have achieved something, so I just manage the team, manage the ego, manage the attitude and keep them focused,” he said. “They are playing very well, but as I said, they are young so today they are playing very good and another day they are mediocre. But so far, so good, preparations are going well.”

Apart from winning football titles, he said one of his main goals is to ensure the boys stay in school.

“Keep their eyes on the prize and make sure that at the end of the day they are being a student, because I’ve lost a few of them because they never continued being a student. I’ve lost about six or seven of them,” he said.

Coach Lofters also said he is content with the sponsorship boost given to schoolboy football.

“It looks good, I don’t know what is coming back to the schools, but for the competition it looks good,” he said.