SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — Members of the St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) cricket team all seemed a little bemused as the team manager of upwards of 30-odd years Dr Donovan Bennett handed over $5,000 to their teammate Odain McCatty.

“I have been walking around with this (money) in my pocket since 1979,” said a beaming Bennett, who is popularly referred to as ‘Doc’.

STETHS had just claimed their 21st hold on the all-island Grace Spalding Cup — symbol of schoolboy cricket supremacy in Jamaica — beating Innswood High by seven wickets.

Amazingly, despite all that success down the years, McCatty had become the first STETHS player to score a century in the competition when he did so against Innswood last month.

For all those years and more dating back to the 1970s, Bennett, a 65-year-old medical doctor whose alma mater is St George’s College, has been with the STETHS cricket programme, always keeping a watchful eye.

Bennett, now a vice-president of the Jamaica Cricket Association (JCA), recalls that his relationship with STETHS started as a teenager during the school’s infancy in 1964, when he got a job as a pre-trained Chemistry teacher.

It was only “for a very short time” as Bennett soon went off to university.

Soon after completing medical training and returning to St Elizabeth, Bennett was at STETHS helping with the football programme at the request of principal John Pottinger and coach Oliver Clue.

By 1979, he had taken control of the cricket programme at the request of Pottinger and reaped immediate success with STETHS winning the all-rural Headley Cup. That team included the offspinner Errol Wilson who would later represent Jamaica. Bennett recalls that he had plenty of technical help in those early days from Danny Senior, Eldemire Smith, and a youthful Junior Bennett (no relation) now the Jamaica coach.

Pressed by work, Bennett took a break from hands-on coaching in 1991, handing over to his namesake whose coaching skills were improving rapidly. But Bennett never relinquished his role as manager, always on the look-out for the best interest of the players.

“I always strive to make sure that the boys are okay, that gears and other requirements are in place,” Bennett told the Jamaica Observer Central.

The success on the field apart, a source of joy for Bennett is the increasingly good academic returns with “more and more” of the young cricketers securing university and other tertiary places.

He claims STETHS has been able to dominate schoolboy cricket over the past 30 years because of “hard work”, planning, close attention to detail, and the development of basic infrastructure, including a nursery which is very well equipped by Jamaican standards.

In the process, the school has produced a host of Jamaica and West Indies cricketers and even an England cricketer — fast bowler Devon Malcolm.

“Once you develop a culture of winning over a long period of time, it is not easy to change that,” said Bennett. But he cautions that the school must continue doing the things that have been successful, including paying “attention to the basics and taking care of our coaches”.

Now Bennett says he is looking to reducing his professional and business activities which include operation of the popular river boat ride, St Elizabeth Safari. And with that, he says, he will have even more time for cricket at STETHS.

“I am looking forward to it,” he said.