The Jamaica Paralympic Association (JPA) will this year launch Sports Edupower, a series of seminars to be delivered by industry experts, JPA achievers and ambassadors designed to redefine, for sportsmen and women as well as stakeholders, the educational and professional landscape in an evolving global sport industry.

JPA President Christopher Samuda said that “the seminars will reset the game on the field of play and boardroom for sport practitioners using the tool of education in re-engineering concepts and methodologies in academia and the business of sport”.

Paralympian Shauna-Kay Hines, a motivational speaker and multiple medallist in the para sport of taekwondo in the Americas, had a vision while competing, pursued it to the Paralympic Games and recently earned a bachelor of science degree in Sport Leadership and Management (Major) Facilities Management (Minor) with Second Class Honours (Upper Division) from the University of the West Indies, Mona. “My degree represents edupower, edu-transformation, discipline, the same discipline it takes to train, to compete, persevere, fall and rise again,” Hines said.

JPA director Ryan Foster underscores the JPA’s philosophy: “You come to sport with a dream to succeed. We do all that we can to inspire it so that, finally, you may live its reality, on merit, in the boardroom, on the turf and in the business of life in becoming the architects of your destiny,” he commented.

Hines had an “edupower” example in Travis Ebanks, chairman of the JPA’s Athletes Commission and para badminton player, who is a practising attorney-at-law for over three years and has had the privilege of representing the JPA at international conferences. Last year he was a member of Jamaica’s delegation to the conference of State Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was held at the United Nations.

Mikayla Brown, para-archer, who has her eyes on the LA 2028 Paralympic Games target and, who in November last year, represented Jamaica at the Junior Para Panamerican Games in Chile, is also laser-focused at the University of Technology, where she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration majoring in Human Resource Management.

“It’s all about powering today’s path to empower tomorrow’s journey,” Brown said.

The road for an athlete and practitioner can be challenging but for Samuda, “there are no stop signs on your educational journey. You obtain knowledge and know-how in the classes and tutorials of academia and thereafter experience and social wisdom in the lecture theatres of the ‘university of life’. Sport is no different,” he said.

A functional education is an invaluable human asset, and Hines says it all with good and sound advice.

“To my fellow para-athletes and able-bodied sportsmen and women, sport teaches us values and discipline, but education transforms them into power dividends. Medals fade, records are broken, but knowledge stays with you for life. Your sporting career has a timeline; your education doesn’t. Be disciplined enough to prepare for your future, because long after the final race, match, or whistle, your mind will still be working for you,” Hines said.

Jamaica Paralympic Association president Christopher Samuda .

Travis Ebanks.

Shauna-Kay Brown.