THIS weekend’s vaccination blitz targeting students 12 years and over — made possible by the recent gift from the United States of 204,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine — provides light amid the gloom of the latest surge in novel coronavirus cases.

As explained by Education Minister Ms Fayval Williams, vaccinated students will be able to attend face-to-face classes in September. However, with the Delta variant now driving the current surge, the unvaccinated will have to go online.

Obviously, academics take priority as the country looks to the return of school. But also, we are hopeful for student athletes, many of whom have been unable to compete in their various sporting disciplines since early 2020 when the pandemic took hold.

Readers may recall that when COVID-19 forced the scrapping of face-to-face school in March 2020 all school sports came to a grinding halt.

Convinced by intense lobbying early this year, the Jamaican Government gave permission for schools to resume competition in athletics, subject to strict protocols aimed at minimising virus spread. As it turned out, organisers of school sports, the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association, gained high praise for organising a safe and very successful high school Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships (Champs) — without spectators but widely followed audio-visually in Jamaica and beyond.

However, other school competitions between January and June this year were mostly abandoned. Also, face-to-face classes on the academic side were sporadic at best, because of COVID-19.

Yet, the success of Champs had led to optimism that schoolboy football could have taken place with strict restrictions in the upcoming school term. Hope escalated when the Government eased restrictions under the Disaster Risk Management Act in June after COVID-19 cases fell dramatically.

News reports spoke of plans for “centralised secure” venues with “multiple games per day” in both the all-rural daCosta Cup and the urban Manning Cup. There were reports that fewer schools than normal had indicated an intention to compete, which would presumably have made life easier for organisers.

Sadly, the alarming new surge of COVID-19 cases has again cast high school sports in serious doubt.

But all is not lost. Mass vaccination of high school students in coming weeks could provide a grand window of opportunity for the football season to take place — even without spectators — perhaps starting in late October. That could provide a platform for a return to school sports across the board.

The need to return to face-to-face classes should result in high percentage take-up by students generally, and specifically for student athletes yearning to resume organised training and competition.

It’s well established that the country’s extraordinary success rate in track and field, for example, has its roots firmly laid in the tradition of high school competitions.

At the recent Tokyo Olympic Games not all medal winners were stars at the high school level, but all had a grounding there. Much the same is true of other sports.

Increasingly, Jamaicans are earning a good living from sport, and while its promise as a major contributor to gross domestic product (GDP) is yet to be achieved, the potential remains enormous.

In such circumstances we expect no vaccine hesitancy from our student athletes, coaches, and other support staff.