Many things in the US Virgin Islands (USVI) are determined by small measures, which are too numerous to name here.

But for the sake of those who have never visited the tiny United States territory, the USVI is known for its small roadways, population (about 106,000), malls, airports and buses, to name a few. Of the three main islands of the Caribbean archipelago, this is most pronounced on mountainous St Thomas.

The other islands are St Croix and St John.

But in this place where small or tiny seems the trend, there is no shortage of stout-heartedness and big thinkers.

For on these islands where life is fuelled in large measure by American culture, beliefs and general way of life, there appears little room for anything else.

But in all the ‘Americanisation’ of the picturesque islands, there are those who are fighting back to entrench a genuine sense of a multi-cultural society, which is the true representation of the USVI with its rich multi-ethnic layout.

In sport, that battle wages on as bastard children football and cricket gasp for air, while American-influenced sports like basketball and baseball live the lavish life.

Almost at every turn, there are well kept baseball mini-stadia and fully equipped regulation-sized basketball gymnasiums, clear signs of resource spending and commitment.

Officials have confirmed that the islands do not have an authentic football stadium, and critically, lack sustained corporate and government support. The US Virgin Islands Soccer Federation (USVISF) almost absolutely depends on FIFA’s assistance programmes to survive.

The stone cold reality is that football life in the USVI is a relative newborn when compared to her sister islands in the umbrella Caribbean Football Union (CFU).

Having had its formation “in the 1970s” and played its first international match in 1998 — the same year Jamaica debuted at a World Cup Finals — sums up the USVI story.

To add to that, the USVI hosted their first full international tournament earlier this month, which was Group Four of the CFU Under-17 men’s World Cup qualifier on St Thomas where Jamaica were a comfortable table-topper.

And the way they went about playing hosts from an organisational perspective threw their inexperience in the spotlight, and USVISF president Hillaren Frederick will be the first to admit to it.

“This is the first time we are hosting a group and we know we tried our best and we just hope that the teams from Jamaica, Antigua and Guyana will sympathise with us,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

According to Frederick, no other CFU member country stepped forward to host, but he saw the opportunity to test the USVI capacity in this area and to possibly add some prestige to his federation’s portfolio in a regional context.

“No one actually wanted to host the group, but one of my vice-presidents said ‘let’s go for it’, and here we are,” he said in a face-to-face with this newspaper at the Windward Passage Hotel in St Thomas.

Before taking on the most recent challenge, Frederick said the USVISF’s only foray into hosting any form of international football occurred earlier this year, but that venture paled in comparison to that of the Under-17s’.

“Earlier this year we hosted two Caribbean Cup matches involving Guyana and Grenada at the cricket stadium near here,” he noted.

All the visiting teams for the Under-17 play-offs complained of the quality of the playing surface of the Lionel Roberts Stadium, which, among other things, was deemed uneven and bumpy. The facility is a multi-purpose one with an eight-lane running track and limited seating.

“Our biggest challenge is that we don’t have a football stadium, but in St Croix we are actually developing one now through the FIFA Goal Programme.

“In fact we have finished one Goal Project, which is an administrative building, and we have moved to phase two with the technical centre… we are about to do the excavation of the land for the playing field, so we are hoping that in the next year or two we will have a completed stadium,” Frederick said, bursting with obvious anticipation.

Apart from lack of ideal infrastructure and organisational naivety, Frederick bemoaned the paucity in corporate support for the tournament, and football in general on the islands.

“We are not different from some of the other countries as it is difficult to get sponsors, but what’s good is that we get a lot of small donations from corporations (for U-17 tournament), but in the case of long-term sponsorship that is a difficult thing.

“But we are surviving with the help of FIFA and we are hoping now that CONCACAF will implement their Financial Assistance Programme so we can actually get some more funding.”

Frederick conceded that his team was pushed to the limit organisationally to get everything in place ahead of the July 15 kick-off, added pressure obviously brought on by the tournament being brought forward by a week.

“It (tournament) was brought forward because of the unavailability of a stadium and the USVI players were slated to travel to Denmark next week (week after tournament) … the Virgin Islands were actually a colony of Denmark and 2017 will be 100 years since they sold the islands to the United States and the celebrations have started already where our U-17s will be travelling to Denmark, and in 2017, Denmark will be visiting us, so those are the main reasons,” he explained.

Frederick, who is a power plant supervisor, says he continues to implore potential sponsors and government to buy into his vision of gaining respectability for USVI football.

“We want to solicit more from the government… they gave us the land out in St Croix on a 30-year lease on 12 acres of land, (for Goal Project), but we have actually applied for some land on the western side of St Thomas.

“At the moment, our biggest challenge is actually facilities and we need to build on that and continue to overall develop the sport,” he added.

Ranked an unflattering 196th by FIFA, Frederick remains undaunted in his mighty fight to grow football and has crafted a multi-flanking approach to achieve his goals.

“We are going to continue to host our development courses with coaches and referees as the idea is to continue to develop our solid programmes.

“As I said, we have the structures as we have a grassroots programme, men’s and women’s programmes, but we are struggling with the girls. “Our youth teams are performing and improving and we have our technical director and our coaches, so everything is in place for us to develop,” he expressed.

It’s weird, but the USVISF boss has also measured the growth of his youth teams, not by their victories, but by the diminishing margins of defeat. One may laugh about it, but that’s the reality of one of the Caribbean’s perennial beating sticks who are known to regularly lose contests in double digits.

“We lost to Guyana one-nil (in Under-17 play-offs), so our guys have turned around those numbers as there was a time when we were getting a lot more than one goal, so that shows that our players are improving.

“I know people will say, ‘yeah, the team lost again’, but the team is playing with a purpose, fighting, and the losses are not as bad as they used to be… we just want to move from strength to strength and to just keep moving, and in five years or less we will be surprising a lot of Caribbean countries,” Hillaren concluded.

In the recent CFU competition, the hosts lost all three matches, including a crushing 9-0 to Jamaica. They also lost 1-5 to Antigua and Barbuda.