Exuberance met experience when the Scotiabank Business House team came out to share technical skills with the Harbour View Football Club Under-13 team, who will represent Jamaica at the upcoming Scotiabank/CONCACAF Under-13 Football Champions League.

The event, now in its second year, takes place in Mexico City from July 23 to July 28.

The Scotiabank players, who were on hand to share some of their technical experience, spent some of the time doing one on one, showing how to move the ball and change direction, practising two versus one situations and ending with shots on goal.

According to Scotiabank coach Marcell ‘Fuzzy’ Gayle, “This is a great initiative. It’s good for the development of the youth. It all begins here.”

This is the second time Harbour View Football Club has been selected to attend this event. At the last championships, the team finished third in their zone with three points behind Canadian zone winners Montreal Impact (nine points) and second-placed Aguilas UAS of Mexico (six points). This year, they will contend against 16 teams from across Central America, North America and the Caribbean.

According to Manager Clyde Jureidini, they are in fully-fledged preparation, training three times weekly, with practice games at various locations across the island. There is also a training camp scheduled to take place prior to their departure.

This year he is hopeful that the team will perform better, and pointed to a number of issues for the last event that got in the way of their performance. According to him “the main problem was the anxiety, because they were not used to the altitude, or the rarefied air, and so breathing became a problem”.

“What we found with the boys was, although the breathing was a problem, it was really the anxiety they were experiencing because they didn’t know what to do. After they got the hang of it, they really settled down,” he said.

This time they have increased the intensity of the training to get them physically and mentally ready for the high altitudes in Mexico, and to get them prepared to play at their best.

“What we have done is we have mixed our preparation with endurance and physical exercise, so we have put a little bit longer into the preparation, a little more physical to get their breathing capacity, and mental to get them used to knowing that they can work on hills, in the sands, and on the roads,” said Jureidini. In addition, “we are going into the tournament two days earlier so they can adjust and acclimatise in the environment”, he continued.

Last year the team arrived at its hotel at 2:00 in the morning and played a Mexican side 12 hours later. “That almost killed them,” he said. “We lost one nil.”

Scotiabank signed on as the official bank of CONCACAF and the league’s first official partner in 2014. They are also title sponsors of the Gold Cup, the Champions League, and the Caribbean Nations Cup. The inaugural Scotiabank/CONCACAF Under-13 Football Championships took place in Mexico City in 2015.

The Scotiabank football team has been a top team for many years in the Business House competition. Players are from some of the top leagues in the country and they are trained by Gayle, coach the University of the West Indies.