SANTA CRUZ , St Elizabeth — Last season St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) swept all before them until they were decisively stopped by Jamaica College (JC) in the all-island schoolboy football final, the Olivier Shield.

By then, STETHS had won the all-rural daCosta cup as well as the knock-out Ben Francis Cup – becoming the latest of only a few teams to win the all-rural double.

But with a month to go before the start of the new schoolboy season, the usually confident STETHS coach Omar Wedderburn is playing down talk of another triumphant campaign.

“Right now we are just getting fit and ready; we are no more than 55 per cent to 70 per cent,” Wedderburn told the Jamaica Observer Central.

The Santa Cruz-based STETHS has done well so far in the annual pre-season STETHS Cup which involves select rural and urban schools. But Wedderburn says he is not paying too much attention to results in pre-season matches.

“The real thing starts next month,” he said.

For the coming season, the STETHS football squad will be very different and much more youthful compared to last year with only “three regular starters” remaining, Wedderburn said.

— Garfield Myers