‘Go to school and do your schoolwork’

For student-sportsmen who wish to compete at competitions organised by the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA), the body in charge of high school sports in Jamaica, there are two basic requirements: go to school and do your schoolwork. That’s the message from ISSA President Keith Wellington.

As guest speaker at the recent launch of the PA Benjamins Wesley Powell Track and Field meet, Wellington used the upcoming athletics season as a launch pad and said, “You must attend school for at least 80 per cent of the term prior to the competition that you are going to participate in. So if you want to do track in January, between September and December, you must have attended school for 80 per cent of the time during that period because we want to make sure you are a student at the school.”

Wellington, who is the headmaster at St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS), noted that some students may face exceptional circumstances. “Obviously, we have situations in Jamaica where attendance of students doesn’t necessarily get to that level for different reasons, and so ISSA is willing to take on a case-by-case basis a situation where a student is unable to meet that requirement.” He listed illness, economic hardships and crime as possible reasons for exemptions.

Moving to another ISSA stipulation, Wellington continued, “the other basic requirement for eligibility to participate in ISSA competitions is that there must be some evidence to indicate that you are actually attempting to do schoolwork.”

Then he specified, “so we have an academic requirement which is simply aimed at saying to us that this student attended school and attempted to do schoolwork and therefore the rule as it stands now, you must be able to present at least four subjects where you have an average of a minimum of 45 per cent.”

There is one additional requirement. “You can’t be absent from school this term but because you want to go to Champs, you turn up in January, train and when the entry is required you say from January to March, I have an average of 45 in five subjects. You must start from September,” the ISSA president underlined.

He made the case that students typically do more than five subjects during their ISSA eligibility. “At STETHS, a student starts in grade 7. He does 14 subjects. In grade 9, they do 19 subjects. In grade 10, they do eight and other schools may have different numbers,” he said.

“So all of these are variations within our school system,” said the educator/sports administrator.

In summary, Wellington added, “when you leave high school, most colleges you matriculate with five subjects to do a degree programme, so we believe that four subjects is a reasonable assessment of you being able to find some level of competency academically.”

The ongoing schoolboy football season has seen its fair share of eligibility. Jamaica College, winners of the 2022 Manning Cup competition, were docked three points for using an ineligible player in a preliminary round game. Shorn of those points, Jamaica College were unable to advance to the knock-out round of this year’s Manning Cup.