SAO PAULO, Brazil — When Jamaica secured the rights to host the CONCACAF Under-17 Championship from February 14-27 on the island’s north coast, it not only gave the Young Reggae Boyz home advantage, but provides a great boost for sports tourism, said JFF general secretary Horace Reid.

“Haiti have formally requested assistance in setting up a three-week camp in Jamaica, so we are working on it. We may end up playing against the Haitians as well. The Cubans have also expressed an interest for a camp in Jamaica, again these are spin-offs from having the games in Jamaica,” the veteran administrator told the Observer.

He continued: “We started to see direct benefits to our economy and our tourism sector and football development. It is important that everybody in the country realises the benefit of staging international tournaments”.

Hosting the the tournament, Reid suggested, will give tourism target markets — like USA and Canada — and the rest of the world a great opportunity see Brand Jamaica up close.

“It is sports tourism and it gives the world a chance to look at our products and hopefully we can make a success of the tournament. It gives us an opportunity to stage other tournaments in Jamaica at different levels and hopefully we can improve on our local facilities that would give us a chance for a bigger stage even a FIFA tournament which happened twice so far in Trinidad… so we can replicate that in Jamaica,” Reid said.

The potential for growth as a sport tourism destination is endless for Jamaica, Reid said.

“I think there is a lot of potential to grow as a tourism destination in sports. And not only for tournaments, we talk about countries that do training camps away from their countries,” he noted.

“When you look here in Brazil, the number of countries that do it. Jamaica is a tropical climate so it is a prime opportunity for international camps to be staged in Jamaica,” Reid added.

Jamaica, drawn in Group C with Trinidad and Tobago and Guatemala at the 12-nation championship, have secured two practice matches against the powerful USA on January 27 and 30, and this exercise is expected to provide crucial measure of where the team is on the eve of kick off.

“The USA is consistently one of the teams to qualify from our region and it will provide very good competition,” Reid said.

“We need to improve and develop more facilities and not even talking about 30,000 seaters, we are talking about 10,000 seaters and it don’t have to be state-of-the-art, once it is carrying the minimum requirements, sufficient dressing rooms, lightings, good fields and spectator accommodation,” said the chairman of the CONCACAF Administration Committee.