KINGSTON, Jamaica – New head coach, Donovan Lofters, is oozing confidence that Camperdown High School will add to their three Manning Cup titles when the upcoming schoolboy football season is completed.

According to Lofters, he will be using the knowledge gained from being a successful accountant consultant and his playing days to instil the requisite skills that his players will need to guarantee success on the football pitch.

“The team will be very competitive because we have prepared the team to win the competition and I will settle for nothing less.

 “What I bring to this team is my personality and playing style. In my private life, I think I am successful so I try to preach success to the players and my playing style as a footballer, I am a pretty good No 6, so if you look at my team, you will see that coming out, a passing game,” Lofters said.

 Lofters took over the reins from Christopher Bender, who guided Camperdown to the quarter-finals of the last competition in 2019. All competitive sports in schools were stopped last year, because of COVID-19.

The east Kingston-based institution last lifted the Manning Cup in 1982, after back-to-back successes in 1978 and 1979.

Lofters believes that the preparation that his charges have put in will help them break the school’s nearly 40-year drought and lift the crown once again.

 “COVID didn’t affect us that bad because I got my players vaccinated early so we only broke training for maybe a week, so we were back on track and we are coping with COVID. We are satisfied with where we are now.

“We have been training consistently and we have been playing a lot of practice matches and so far, we have only lost twice to (Jamaica) Premier League teams and we have been doing well, so I think we are ready,” Lofters stated.

According to Lofters, Camperdown has won all their practice matches against high school teams by more than three goals and have defeated youth academies by more than six goals. Their only losses in the pre-season so far have been against JPL champions Cavalier and former champions Portmore United, he said.

 He believes that Giovanni Morgan, Dugeno Clarke and Craig Johnson, who all played intermittently in the 2019 Manning Cup season, will be Camperdown’s key players this year, as well as two transfers from Denham Town and one from Bridgeport, who also have experience in the competition.

He would not disclose the names of the transfers as “it’s my secret”, but said that the team will also include players that went to the semi-finals of the 2019 Colts (Under-16) competition.

 Camperdown are drawn in Group B of the competition alongside Dunoon Park Technical, Excelsior, Jonathan Grant, Jose Marti, St Andrew Technical High School (STATHS), St Jago and Tivoli Gardens. Lofters is expecting their main rivals in the group to be STATHS and traditional powerhouse Excelsior.