Dear Editor,

I write in response to my good friend “Muggy” Graham’s articles on the issue of recruiting of athletes by the various high schools.

I support his position that schools must be centres for academic learning, although they can and should contribute to the development of the student/athlete holistically.

He is strongly opposed to the recruitment of players from one school to another as this serves to rob one school of a talented individual and perhaps deny academically gifted students spaces in the school of their choice.

Given this scenario, is there justification for continuation of the practice of poaching players from one school to another? Perhaps there is.

From my own observation, transferred players tend to go where sports are taken more seriously. Whether we like it or not sports today is becoming big business, and if we accept this people will stop at nothing to enhance their chances of succeeding. Being competitive will translate into not only more glory, but more money. That is where the whole world is heading.

Perhaps the time is ripe to sort schools on the basis of their ambitions. Schools that take sports very seriously should only be allowed to compete against schools with similar ambitions. This will allow for more competitiveness among the better schools. This is the way college sports are organised in the USA. Division 1 schools seldom compete against schools from lower divisions.

Emphasis on sport does not mean that academics should take a back seat. What schools could do is to combine the two by allowing students to treat sports as a subject, so that a typical student could carry four to six academic subjects along with one to two sporting subjects and graded along the way to becoming a better player/student. The mix will obviously depend on their abilities, both sporting and academic. At the end of the day , what would be wrong with getting a distinction in soccer, cricket and passes in math and English? You might not be able to go to Wall Street to work as an investment banker, but you could become a professional player.

Jamaica cannot depend solely on football or cricket clubs to nurture talent because they don’t have sufficient resources. Clubs, therefore, will have to partner with schools that are serious about sports, identify talent from an early age and start the nurturing. Any talent spotted early should become the property of the club making the investment in the player. Lionel Messi was spotted at about age 10 or so by Barcelona scouts and a contract was done on a piece of tissue paper to secure the rights to him.

Perhaps the time is ripe to start a pilot with some of the aforementioned ideas, because we cannot continue doing things the same way and expect different results.

Peter Hamilton

pedrocitoja@hotmail.com