DONOVAN Corcho, director of baseball at the Institute of Sports (Insports), is devoted to the development of the game in Jamaica and already has put plans in place to achieve that goal.

Corcho told the Jamaica Observer in an interview recently that the main goal is to include baseball on the physical education curriculum at the primary school level.

Achieving this, he said, would see them “avoiding a collision course” between the sport and the children, as it would become a part of their daily activities.

“Once we take that route, then there are some things we have to put in place. We have to have the skill sets with the PE teachers so that they can impart the knowledge,” he said.

Corcho highlighted the number of accomplishments over the past years, one of which was the laying of a pitch at GC Foster College.

“In 2010 we trained 34 primary school PE instructors. In 2012 we selected 12 schools to do a pilot…six from St Catherine and six from Kingston and we played a League.

“The choice to build the field at GC Foster College was not an accident because it ties into the growth of baseball. This is the institution that prepares our physical education teachers, and so this move was to have them prepare people at the certification level, so that when they get into these primary schools they don’t just have the traditional football and track & field skills, but they would have also acquired the baseball skills,” he explained.

Major League Baseball International, whose mandate is to assist developing countries with the growth of the sport, has supplied agegroup equipment to Insports, which will see them expanding the Pilot League from 12 schools to 24 by April next year.

Plans are also in place to host a number of events at the beginning of the new school year in September. One of those events will be a baseball challenge which will focus on the specifics of the game such as pitching, hitting and base running.

This, he said, is intended to heighten the interest of the sport within the country’s primary schools through their affiliation with Little League Baseball.

“One of the first things we want to do is have all the schools participating in the Insports Primary League to be registered, chartered members of Little League, thereby acquiring all benefits thereof.

“We want to give the government programme that legitimacy, in terms of an internationally recognised entity to put these age-group kids under and there is no bigger age-group baseball entity in the world than Little League. Little League and Insports will always be together to ensure that we get the best for our primary school age-group kids.”

When quizzed about launching a programme in secondary schools, Corcho responded that the government does not have the resources at present to facilitate such effort.

However, Leon Taylor, who is the president of Jamaica Little League Baseball and Softball, which is affiliated with Little League Baseball International situated in Williams Port, Pennsylvania, USA, said that there are plans to involve high school students in order to send a 14-16 age-group team to the Little League Regional Qualifying Tournament.