IN life the aim must always be to improve, to learn from the past, whether that experience was positive or negative.

Hence we believe that Jamaica’s senior women’s football Head Coach Mr Hubert Busby is on target when he says the team will benefit from last month’s friendly international 0-3 loss to powerhouse France in that country.

The recent result followed away losses to Brazil in mid-year — all part of preparations for qualifiers ahead of the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

Readers will recall that Jamaica’s Reggae Girlz covered themselves in glory by reaching the knockout stage of the 2023 World Cup in Australia/New Zealand. Four years earlier they broke the ice by qualifying for the global tournament in France.

Following the most recent friendly, Mr Busby noted that inadequacy of time in training prior to the game negatively affected cohesion and performance.

However, he said, “… I thought overall [that] as the game went on, the team got better. I think these are the games that we want to play. We have to just keep on building …”

He voiced expectation that the Reggae Girlz will improve in upcoming home friendlies against South Africa.

He also spoke to the challenge of maintaining cohesion when new players have to be introduced.

“ … You can see that [the team is] a little bit disjointed, and so the more that we can continue to be together and keep building as a group, the better we’ll be,” Mr Busby said.

We know that keeping a consistent core of players over time is always a challenge. We suspect that’s especially so when, as is well established, Jamaica’s national women’s team is predominantly overseas-based.

The long-term plan must be to so build local women’s football programmes that Jamaica can compete well — even when overseas-based professionals are unavailable.

Yet, as the Concacaf women’s club league showed earlier this year, the local club league and the schoolgirls’ league are woefully inadequate in terms of preparing our girls and young women for higher-level competition.

Much more needs to be done.

We are inclined to believe primary/prep school leagues for young girls could help.

Apart from the obvious benefits to national teams, we all know that well-organised and sponsored sports programmes provide a path out of poverty and hopelessness for young people.

The big problem is always money. Government funding is stretched, and corporate Jamaica is often reluctant to spend on programmes which show no quick promotional returns.

However, if we stop to think about it, there is much to be gained by society as a whole if our young people can be positively influenced.

And, despite the hurdles here, there are a number of Jamaican-born and -bred women footballers who have excelled at the highest level, as was exemplified at the last World Cup.

For an example we need look no further than Manchester City’s super star Ms Khadija “Bunny” Shaw. A native of Spanish Town who began playing football with her brothers, Miss Shaw — who for one reason or another has not represented her country since the 2023 World Cup — is today among the world’s leading footballers.

It’s within us as a people to produce many more just like her, if we would only try.