André Lowe, Special Projects Editor (Sports)

Student athletes with individual commercial arrangements may soon be barred from competing at the Inter- Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA)/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls Athletics Championships, if a position championed by ISSA president Dr Walton Small is ratified in early June.

The ISSA board will meet during the first week of June to decide whether or not they should ban student athletes with endorsement deals from participation at the marquee event. this is in the wake of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletics Association's (PIAA) decision to bar local schoolboy standouts Michael O'Hara and Jaheel Hyde, from competing at the upcoming Penn Relays because of their commercial arrangements with local telecommunication companies.

ISSA announced through a release issued yesterday that Calabar High's O'Hara and Wolmer's Boys' Hyde will not be allowed to represent their schools at the relay carnival after the PIAA pointed to them receiving "benefits related to their athletic skills and performances".

"In a communiqué to ISSA, the PIAA today (Monday) said that both athletes are deemed to have received benefits related to their athletic skills and performances which are not available to all students at their schools. On this basis, both athletes cannot represent their respective school at the 2015 Penn Relays," the release read.

Hyde is sponsored by LIME, which is a sponsor of Champs, while O'Hara's endorsement with rival Digicel was announced controversially on the last day of the just, concluded championships.

Yesterday, Small said it was important that ISSA protect the integrity of Champs and the student athletes while noting that there may be regulation to prevent commercial student athletes from participating.

He noted that the necessary regulatory changes will be made in the coming months.

"As it relates to our students participating at Penn Relays and as it relates to ISSA, we have nothing in our rules that would prevent them from participating at Penns, so we will now have to look at what transpired and then put things in place to guide our athletes," Small said.

"We (ISSA) are going to be meeting to formulate those rules either in the early part of June to address those rules and I can give you an idea of where our head space is at this moment," he continued. "We are not preventing support to school programmes, we are looking that if any benefits are going to be transferred to any students, it has to be to the entire team, it can't be an individual arrangement.

"This is an amateur event. we must understand this. The rules will be along those lines we will put in the rules that will prevent companies and individuals from bringing harm to the students - like in this case (O'Hara and Hyde being barred from Penns), with them not being able to participate," Small said.

Small added that ISSA has sought the advice of several key sporting administrators and commercial partners and that they will also be pushing for greater involvement of principals and school administration, in deals involving student athletes.