The thirteenth staging of the Social Development Commission (SDC)/Wray & Nephew National Community T20 Cricket Competition was launched at 23 Dominica Drive on Wednesday to much fanfare.

The new title sponsors are spending a significant sum on ensuring that the public is made aware that the community-based competition is being played across the length and breadth of the island.

The President of the Jamaica Cricket Association Billy Heaven, who spoke at the ceremony, lauded both SDC and the sponsors Wray & Nephew, for their efforts in putting on the tournament, but challenged them to increase the impact of the competition on the development of the game.

Heaven spoke about all the good the competition currently does, but wants to see the focus move beyond entertainment and recreation.

“This competition has a huge reach, there are many teams in the competition, 229 teams. If you assume 15 persons per team you are looking at 3435 persons participating in this competition, and that is remarkable. It is islandwide, it is 327 communities and that will make a difference.

“But as the executive director said, at the moment, it is essentially played as a recreational and entertainment sport, and those are the two values to this competition, the entertainment value and the recreational value,” said Heaven.

“These are really good in themselves because they speak to team spirit and now they speak to the sponsors’ spirit as it were, they speak to social cohesion, they build community spirit, and they reduce the social evils in communities… so given all of this, it gives value for money and it is good for the development of cricket in Jamaica.

“But one of the things we have to recognise is that it’s a means to an end competition, it’s not an end in itself. So I believe that the time has come for us to seek to organise this competition with some greater emphasis on the development aspect of the game.

“JCA, SDC, WIPA, we need to develop a partnership that will lead to the professional development of players and this competition must seek to produce players for the World T20 market, because that’s a big market, and they are emerging markets as well,” he added.

President of the West Indies Players Association (WIPA) Wavel Hinds is in agreement with the position taken by Heaven.

“I think that’s a very good position. The Jamaica Cricket Association has an integral role to play in the development of each player.

“It is very important that the SDC competition is used not just for entertainment, and of course importantly, driving and partnering with communities to ensure that we have a good social intervention, but also that in the development of the game itself and in the promotion of people itself that the JCA can seek to find talent,” he noted.

Hinds believes that there is talent that can be found within the communities that can make it all the way to the international scene.

“We can develop those talents and have them being exported to West Indies or just on the international domestic T20 circuit. The socio-economic value of that is of course well known, so I think it’s a good initiative, so I want to support President Heaven on that and we at WIPA will do everything that we can to help that sort of development to try and drive the game forward.

“Partnerships are important and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. If there is a viable T20 competition going on we can look to build and strengthen that, and try and make sure that it is from the very root of each parish which is made up of many communities. I think the JCA can use it as a very good tool to try and scour the island properly, so that they can unearth the talent that is there.

“There are a lot of talent coming through the school system, but there are a lot of them sitting in the communities actively playing community cricket but not promoting themselves at the club level so they are not uncovered. This is a good way to uncover some of these talent and put some development behind them so we can see the true value of what SDC is doing and what Wray and Nephew is doing,” he reasoned.

Dr Dwayne Vernon, the executive director of SDC, believes that each entity within the partnership should play their role as best as they can.

“It is about partnerships and the role of each partner. SDC primarily uses the sport to energise communities and get them involved in wider community development planning, thus the mandatory 15% of monies won by teams going to a community project,” he noted.

Racecourse from Clarendon are the defending champions of the competition.