President of the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) Keith Wellington said his organisation is deeply concerned with the level of indiscipline on and off the field in last season’s schoolboy football competitions, prompting his association to take a hard line against this behaviour this year.

The data provided by ISSA from last year has shown that there were 49 red and 487 yellow cards issued during the Manning Cup from 211 games. For the daCosta Cup competition, there were 59 red cards and 705 yellow cards in 433 games.

One glaring example of the raging indiscipline occurred in a Manning Cup match between Camperdown High and Papine High last season when five players were shown straight red cards after a major bust-up between rival players. Of the five, three players were sent off for Camperdown, while two were ejected from Papine.

Wellington told the Jamaica Observer that his association will be taking a zero tolerance approach to indiscipline this season and anyone who violates the rules of the game will be punished.

“Students who participate in sports are not exempt from that particular process and so, as a matter of fact, we hope that giving them the opportunity to participate in sporting activities will actually provide them with the opportunity to develop their discipline,” said Wellington.

“We want to ensure that this year we minimise, or if not eliminate, all acts of indiscipline. We were concerned with the number of incidents that we had last year, particularly those incidents that involved multiple players being involved at the same time in acts of indiscipline, so this year we will be taking a zero-tolerance approach to the indiscipline,” he said.

Wellington says governing bodies worldwide have had to deal with the devil of poor behaviour and sportsmanship in the sport but have reacted appropriately and strongly to offenders and offences.

“If you look at football itself and measures that have been put in place now by the world’s governing FIFA, I think that it is keeping with what we want to see in our school competition,” Wellington said.

The ISSA boss, who is the principal of St Elizabeth Technical High School, also pointed out that his association was also not pleased with the number of red and yellow cards that were issued in both competitions last season.

Wellington also shared that everyone has a vital role to play to ensure that a good level of discipline is maintained in schoolboy football competitions.

“There was a 108 sending off in just over 600 games, and so I think that is way too many and, therefore, that is something that we will have to pay keen attention to, in terms of trying to eliminate these red cards and cautions,” Wellington said.

“I think that all the adults around the teams, not just the coaches and managers, but the schools, the spectators, and parents, so everybody has a role to play to ensure these students understand that the competition is only going to get better with greater discipline. As individual players they will only get better with an improvement with their discipline and certainly from an organisation perspective, we will not tolerate these acts of indiscipline,” he added.

Wellington noted that the referees play a very vital role in the game and they must be shown a great level of respect.

“We want to recognise the part that the referees play. We continue to have a short fall in number of referees that are available, and if we do not ensure that those who are here are treated with respect and the level of discipline that is in the competition is at a standard were are people encouraged to come and officiate, then we will continue to lose referees,” Wellington said.

“This will mean that ultimately, we will have to look at the structure of our competitions and the number of games that we can organise to play if we don’t have enough referees,” he added.

The Manning and daCosta cup competitions are scheduled to kick off on Saturday. Jamaica College are defending Manning Cup champions, while Clarendon College are the reigning daCosta Cup winners.