UTech on mission to create ‘total athlete’

BY KAYON RAYNOR Senior staff reporter ?raynork@jamaicaobserver.com

Saturday, January 30, 2010

ARMED with their plan to develop rounded athletes, the University of Technology (UTech) has joined forces with the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) to undertake a socioeconomic impact assessment of collegiate level sports in Jamaica.

A four-member delegation of UPenn yesterday met with the top-brass of the UTech at their Papine campus, along with representatives of GC Foster College, Hydel University and the Government to announce the collaboration.

President of UTech, Dr Errol Morrison, told Sporting World that this socioeconomic impact assessment will provide important data to further the development of sports at his institution.

“We are saying can you help us think through how best to go forward in the development of our sporting activities to make our programmes better, to assist our students more and to have a greater impact on the community at large and of course that will bound to improve representation of our country internationally,” Dr Morrison said.

“When they get back home, we trust that they can pen something that can give us some kind of game plan as to the way forward. That’s the kind of basic thrust that we are looking for,” he added, noting that he hopes this bilateral committee will help mobilise support in cash or kind to make the collaboration a reality.

Dr Herman Beavers, a professor of English at UPenn, told Sporting World that his Ivy League institution, which mainly focuses on academic excellence, is trying to collaborate with other institutions.

“Part of what we are always interested in, is that symbiosis that happens between life of the mind and life of the body,” Dr Beavers said, adding that the programme forms part of his institution’s programme called the Penn Compact.

“One of the tenets of Penn Compact is for us to reach out to other institutions and collaborate across a variety of disciplines and across a variety of geographical and political boundaries,” Beavers argued.

“My real desire is to make sure that we help UTech create athletes, who are also scholars and who will go on to careers in education, law or medicine,” he added.

Allie McNab, who sits on UTech’s Council of Management and was the representative of Sports Minister Olivia Grange at yesterday’s meeting, gave the government’s blessings to the project.

“It excites me from a government standpoint that we will now be able to take care of those minds even as they do sport, and as they leave sports because we have already engaged the minds in developing themselves individually (then) we are going to have less people going the wrong way,” McNab said.