Even as Jamaicans pay close attention to the projected arrival of Hurricane Matthew, sports fans will have noted plans for the upcoming FLOW Super Cup schoolboy football competition later this month and into November.

Organisers say they have decided to name the most valuable player (MVP) award of the tournament in honour of Mr Dominic James, the St George’s College captain who died recently after collapsing on the football field.

We are told Mr James was the only person to have won the FLOW Super Cup twice, having done so with Jamaica College in the inaugural year in 2014 and again last year with St George’s College.

As local football watchers will be aware, the cash-rich FLOW Super Cup embraces the top teams in the daCosta Cup for rural high school teams and the Manning Cup for teams based in Kingston, St Andrew and the more urban sections of St Catherine.

This newspaper has no disagreement with the decision to honour the memory of the late Mr James in this way, especially since the beneficiary of the award will receive a scholarship worth $100,000, according to Mr Carlo Redwood, FLOW’s vice-president of marketing and television.

Of course, FLOW’s considerable investment in the Super Cup reflects the extraordinary popularity of Jamaican schoolboy football and its resulting value for promotion and marketing.

The tournament will be contested over four weekends, promoted as the ‘Champions League of Schoolboy Football’. The winners of the eight daCosta Cup inter-zone rounds will be up against the eight zone winners in the Manning Cup in a knockout format with games being played at three venues: Sabina Park and the National Stadium in Kingston, and the Montego Bay Sports Complex.

Even in schools sport, money ‘makes the mare run’, and as was the case last year, the champions of the FLOW Super Cup will win $1 million. We are told that each team in the Super Cup will receive $25,000 for just qualifying, with additional earnings thereafter.

Teams advancing to the quarter-finals will get an additional $50,000, while the four semi-finalists will each earn another $100,000. The two finalists will get $200,000 with the winner getting an additional $625,000, which will add up to the million-dollar prize and a trophy.

We are told that “benefits like full kits including football boots for players” will be among the incentives. Crucially, too, the FLOW Super Cup will be played on the perceived best football fields in the country.

This newspaper applauds FLOW for the Super Cup, even while recognising that everything good brings a cost.

In this case, we note that in order to accommodate the FLOW Super Cup, some schools, on occasions, are being asked to play as many as four games in eight days in order to complete their regular fixtures.

Even with the well-advised decision to increase substitutions from three to five, that’s too much competitive football for teenaged players. The problem for organisers, the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA), is that as the situation now stands, there is only a three-month window from September to December for under-19 schoolboy football.

There is no easy solution, but ISSA will have to find a way to provide more breathing space for young players, even while accommodating competitions such as the FLOW Super Cup.