We believe it is fair to say that no one has done more for the advancement of women’s football in Jamaica than Ms Elaine Walker-Brown.

As a young woman, she played the game back when many perceived football as unworthy of a ‘lady’. She has also served as a referee.

But more than all that, together with others, such as current Reggae Girlz manager Ms Jean Nelson, Ms Walker-Brown fought for decades, through thick and thin, to bring women’s football into the mainstream of Jamaican sport.

Long before the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF)  embraced women’s football, following global instruction from FIFA in 1998, Ms Walker-Brown — as part of the Jamaica Women’s Football Federation — was playing a lead role managing, cajoling, entreating, so that Jamaican women footballers could find their rightful place.

For the last 21 years she has been chairman of the JFF’s women’s football committee.

Chronically short of resources, Ms Walker-Brown and others pressed on, building and maintaining a club structure and partnering with the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) for a high school girls’ competition.

We can only imagine her joy and sense of achievement at the Reggae Girlz’s qualification and participation in the FIFA Women’s Football World Cup in France earlier this year.

It’s against that backdrop that this newspaper note’s Ms Walker-Brown’s election to the post of president of the St Catherine Football Association. She is the first woman to lead St Catherine football and, as we understand it, only the third woman to head a parish association in Jamaica.

Such is Ms Walker-Brown’s record that we do not doubt her ability to get the job done.

Intriguingly, she won the support of the majority of voting delegates in St Catherine, despite only getting the support of four clubs at the nomination stage, while her opponent received the support of 28 such clubs.

As an experienced sports officer employed to the Institute of Sports, a former referee, and a match commissioner employed by Fifa, Concacaf, Caribbean Football Union, and the JFF, we expect that Ms Walker-Brown not only knows football inside out, but also that she understands the challenges of administration.

She has spoken of her intention to reorganise St Catherine’s football to make it more relevant, participatory, transparent, and attractive to sponsors.

We are struck by her ambition to use football, in partnership with the authorities, as a tool in tackling St Catherine’s severe crime problems.

We note her pledge that she and members of her executive “will be meeting in short order to roll out our plans of putting the final touches to our strategies to make football alive again in the parish of St Catherine”.

We wish her well.

Also, we applaud losing candidate Mr Ricardo Valentine for his gracious words in defeat. Ms Walker-Brown will need all the help she can get from Mr Valentine, and others like him, for the greater good of St Catherine’s and Jamaica’s football.