President of the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) Keith Wellington has called on schools and coaches to put aside their selfish needs and focus on ensuring that the May 11-15 ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships is safe and the student-athletes get the best opportunities to perform at their optimum.

Wellington repeated his call for the pursuit of points and titles at all cost be put aside and selflessness and the needs of others if the goals are to be achieved.

At a virtual meeting of coaches on Monday, the ISSA boss said his organisation was not seeking any benefits, monetary or otherwise, from Champs, only that the athletes get the benefit.

“Since late September when we began looking at the possibility of having Champs and to look at the options that would be available to us, ISSA took a conscious decision that Champs this year would not be about ISSA as an organisation or the sponsors who have been very supportive of us over the years,” he said.

He repeated his position from earlier this year, saying the championships “would more so be a national event which would be seeking to bring to the people of Jamaica the opportunity that Champs provides for coalescing around a common cause”.

“All our efforts this year would focus solely on what benefits there would be for Jamaica as a country and in particular, the student-athletes and, therefore, all our plans and policies and all the protocols that we have in place to ensure that the country benefit from the staging of Champs and the individual student-athletes benefit from the staging of Champs,” Wellington reasoned.

The ISSA head said the outcome of the championships and winners were not a priority at this time.

“We have said explicitly that it is not important to us who gets the most points from Champs this year and we are saying that the attitude that we expect from our schools, our coaches and our athletes is not about garnering points… because when we do so at times we become selfish rather than selfless.

“Champs this year must be about our selflessness, our ability and our willingness to take away our own needs and put it on the back burner and focus on the needs of others and in particular, this year the needs of all our athletes and all our students and Jamaica as a country.

“Our selflessness must focus on what it is that we are going to do to ensure that it is a safe championships, everything else is going to be secondary; the times that people run, the points that schools score, all of those things will have to be secondary,” Wellington ended.

— Paul Reid