PRESIDENT of the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) Keith Wellington says his organisation is very concerned about the poor officiating quality and the deplorable conditions of many of the playing surfaces during this year’s schoolboy football competitions.

Wellington told the Jamaica Observer that there were too many games where only two match officials turned up instead of the usual four, which he deems unacceptable if the sport is to grow in Jamaica.

“I think that we need to do a lot more where the refereeing is concerned because we had too many [instances] where there were only two referees in the games. And, we also have to look at how it is that we are going to attract more persons to refereeing — not just in terms of the numbers but also the quality,” said Wellington.

“We also have considered where we are going in terms of playing facilities. We only have a few venues that are suitable for schoolboy football because, even at the preliminary stages, there are a lot of schools’ fields that are not worthy of playing competitive football on, and when we get to latter stages of the competition we still did not have enough venues,” he added.

Wellington admitted that the limited suitable venues was a sore point for his organisation.

“We had to be chopping and changing our schedule because we still don’t have enough venues, as we could not get, for example,the National Stadium was not available due to different things,” he noted.

The 2022 schoolboy football season ended on Wednesday with Clarendon College (CC) winning the all-island Olivier Shield title, after beating Jamaica College (JC) 3-0 at the Stadium East field. CC also won the daCosta Cup trophy while Glenmuir captured the Ben Francis Knockout trophy. JC were winners of the Manning Cup and Champions Cup Knockout titles.

This season’s schoolboy football competitions made a full return with spectators after last year’s truncated season when fans were not allowed to attend matches due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wellington, who is the principal of St Elizabeth Technical High School, shared that the standard of the competitions was not up to par compared to previous years as many of the players were playing in the senior competitions for the first time. However, he stated that he was quite happy that there were no major incidents this year.

“I think we had some challenges in the earlier part of the season with the general discipline of the teams,” he said.

“I think that as the season grew we eventually had a very good season, bearing in mind that a lot of these players were not used to playing at this level,” Wellington added.

He said while some standards were lowered, he was pleased that the spirit of competition was high.

“I think that the standard fell a little bit but I think that the competitiveness was really up there in terms of [how it] compared to previous years for both Manning and daCosta Cup competitions, and I think that we may have ended up with the best teams winning,” Wellington ended.