May Day High Principal Stanford Davis says he’s proud of the Under-19 cricket team though they again fell at the last hurdle, losing by 140 runs to neighbours Manchester High in the 2024 Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association Grace Headley Cup final in Mandeville two weeks ago.

It was a back-to-back final disappointment for May Day after perennial winners St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) got the better of them in 2023.

May Day had entered the final against Manchester High with plenty of confidence, having beaten them earlier in the season. But as can happen in sports, things fell apart at the pivotal juncture.

Though expressing disappointment, Davis told the Jamaica Observer that May Day, who until recently did not even have a cricket programme, have far exceeded expectations.

“I know it was going to come down to who played better [in the final], because they are two good teams. May Day lost one match in the Headley Cup season and that was in the final,” said Davis, an avid cricket lover and the man behind May Day’s rise as a cricketing force.

After he started to put the pieces together fewer than 10 years ago, there was incremental growth before Head Coach Oral Simpson joined the May Day High cricket programme in January 2019.

And others played their part.

“We got the whole school, including teachers, admin staff, parents and some past students involved, so it became a concerted effort which also involved people in the community, taxi and bus drivers and so forth coming out to the matches to support the team,” Davis, a former Manchester High student, recounted.

“But reaching the [2023] final in that [short] time was really a bonus, because when we started and looked at the mammoth task, we thought it would have been a really long time before we could even think of reaching the final,” he said.

Davis insisted that while several of May Day’s top cricketers will move on at the end of this school year, the project will continue.

“Most of the boys will be leaving so we will have to rebuild. But it is a process that we are committed to. We shall return,” he said.

Looking at the broader picture, Davis said it was a boost seeing the two teams advancing to the final, especially since only two teams from the parish of Manchester entered the Headley Cup this season.

“To have those two teams going to the final is phenomenal. It looked very difficult [at the start of the season] but it happened that both teams worked hard and ended up in the final,” he noted.

That fact was not lost on veteran Manchester High Head Coach Burtram Barnes, who is a former STETHS student.

“Well done to May Day, I think they gave it a good run. I’m proud… it shows that talent is here [in Manchester] and that’s good for cricket. It’s the first in the history of the Headley Cup that two teams from the parish are playing in the final, which was good for Manchester,” Barnes reasoned.