Western Bureau

The 2009 schoolboy football season will kick off at Jarrett Park in Montego Bay this afternoon and, like the organisers, players, sponsors and fans, who are the main stakeholders, I am hoping and praying that some exceptional young talent will emerge during the course of this season.

It is no secret that within recent years Jamaica's football has hit a snag in terms of turning out star qua-lity players capable of exciting the imagination of the public. In the days of gifted players like Allan 'Skill' Cole and company, people would sneak away from work or even leave their Sunday dinner to go out and watch them play.

Today, it could well be argued that since the emergence of players like Roderick Reid and Walter Boyd in the 1990s, we have not had any schoolboy player who could readily walk into a national senior team. In fact, we have not seen any special schoolboy player who you could honestly say is one for the future.

spotlight

In the era in which I grew up, while senior players such as Allan 'Skill' Cole, Herbert 'Dago' Gordon and Peter 'Dove' Marston were all household names, they had no choice but to share the spotlight with schoolboy stars such as Lenworth 'Teacher' Hyde, Noel 'Sweetie' Smith and Dennis 'Den Den' Hutchinson, because these were youngsters with the requisite skills to command respect.

While a case could be made for players like John Ross Doyley, who represented Glenmuir two seasons ago, Ashton Bennett, the 2007 Garvey Maceo striker, and midfielder Ricardo Morris, who will once again be on show for St James High this season, in my estimation they cannot be compared with players like Hyde, Smith, Hutchinson and even a Douglas 'Duggie' Bell, who repre-sented Jamaica as a schoolboy at Kingston College.

high-quality nursery

With national football seemingly in free-fall mode since our historic qualification for the 1998 World Cup in France, there is now an urgent need for our schoolboy football to once again become a high-quality nursery for the national programme. If we are to regain the type of respect we had in the past, schoolboy football must once again become as a first-class nursery.

I recently noticed that the JFF has been putting a great deal of time and resources into the new junior programme, and while it could complement schoolboy competitions, I wish they would look elsewhere as ISSA has shown over the years that it can effectively manage our junior programme.

Personally, I believe the JFF would be better served establishing a proper national Under-21 competition to fill the void that now exists between football at the schoolboy level and at the club level. It is no secret that in the parishes without NPL representation, many promising young players have simply faded into oblivion because of the absence of meaningful opportunities to highlight their talent.

While the gifted former schoolboy players from Kingston, St Andrew, St Catherine, Clarendon, Trelawny and Portland are afforded the chance to make the transition into high-quality senior football, by virtue of having NPL teams in their parish, their counterparts in Hanover, Westmoreland, St James, St Elizabeth, St Ann, St Mary, St Thomas and Manchester have no such option.

pleasant memories

As we continue to hope and pray for the daCosta Cup and Manning Cup to once again start producing high-quality schoolboy stars, I believe no praise can be too high for ISSA, as without their input over the years we might not have seen many of the stars that have given us so many pleasant memories, at the junior and senior levels, in those many years when schoolboy football sparkled.

With the Edward Seaga-led PLCA basically in charge of the running of the NPL, and ISSA holding the fort at the junior level with schoolboy football, I believe the JFF now needs to find something meaningful to do in order to remain relevant. I would urge the federation to seriously consider establishing a national senior parish competition to facilitate those parishes without NPL teams.

Nb. Feel free to send your feedback to adrianfrater@hotmail.com.