The long interruption to schools’ sports triggered by Hurricane Melissa’s catastrophic impact in late October meant the Christmas term ended with two Under-19 football titles undecided.

As we understand it, the Olivier Shield — traditional symbol of all-island schoolboy football supremacy — and the Champions Cup for top-performing rural and urban schools will be played in January.

Melissa ensured that dedicated all-rural and all-urban titles were decided much later than usual, just a few days before Christmas. That meant that that cup-winning teams could surely claim to have presented Christmas gifts to their schools.

For winners, perhaps the only missing ingredient was the absence of jubilant celebrations on school grounds on Monday, since they had all closed for holidays.

St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS), in Santa Cruz, hit hard by the hurricane, famously overcame Glenmuir High of Clarendon on penalties to take the all-rural daCosta Cup for the sixth time in their 64-year history.

The achievement was especially sweet for STETHS since they played the final 30 minutes of regulation time a player short, following a red-card ejection.

In the urban area, Excelsior High won the prestigious Manning Cup for the first time in 21 years, beating highly fancied Jamaica College 2-0.

The Mountain View Avenue-based Excelsior will now face STETHS for the Olivier Shield in January.

In battles for lesser titles, St Catherine High got past Mona High on penalties to win the urban area Walker Cup, while Clarendon College beat Cornwall College 2-1 to take the rural area Ben Francis Cup.

All praise is due to players, coaches, support staff, school leaders, organisers, and sponsors for staying the course, despite Hurricane Melissa and related challenges.

In that regard, of all the champions, STETHS undoubtedly faced by far the greatest hurdles. Stories of STETHS players — being accommodated on campus — having to twice take flight as roofing flew from over their heads at the height of the storm are chilling, to put it very mildly. Post-Melissa, similar stories abound across the nation’s western half.

Jamaicans will forever be grateful that the storm hit in daylight hours. We daresay the death toll would’ve been much higher after dark.

Such was the damage to classrooms and other infrastructure that STETHS, like many other schools in western Jamaica, resorted to innovative staggering of school days, etc, in order to allow class time for all. Those realities underlined thoughts in some quarters that schools would be better off abandoning football and
other competitions.

To the credit of our school leaders, even those worst hit, they refused to yield. It’s an established historical fact that adversity can nurture great resilience and unexpected strength.

It would appear that, for the STETHS football team, the trials brought on by Melissa added steel and a unified determination to succeed no matter what.

We note the comment from their coach, Mr Omar Wedderburn, in relation to the red-card ejection.

Said he: “When we went down to 10 men we have a thing that we say, ‘The power of we,’ and that’s when the power chipped in…”

It’s that same unified resolve, that oneness, which will help our country to eventually overcome the many gigantic hurdles laid down by Melissa.

Let’s get to it.