Western high school track and field team coaches are happy with last Saturday’s inaugural staging of the Clinicare Relays meet staged at Cornwall College.

With the cancellation of the Western Relays and the high costs of attending meets outside the region, the coaches took advantage of the Clinicare Relays as they continued preparation for the County of Cornwall Athletics Association (COCAA) Western Champs set for G C Foster Sports College on Saturday and the ISSA Athletics Championships in late March.

Fourteen high school and five primary school teams sent athletes to the meet that offered competition in a number of track and field events including relays.

“We missed Western Relays and given that Gibson Relay has gone to a new format this year that will not help the rural schools, we welcomed this opportunity to give the relay teams a chance to qualify,” Rodrick Myles, head coach of William Knibb Memorial High, told the Jamaica Observer.

The proximity and ease of getting to the venue, he said, was also a plus.

“It did not cost us too much to get here and we know our principal would be smiling, so of course we were pleased overall,” he added.

Myles said he was also pleased with the level of competition at the meet.

“We had some really good races and we had some good quality teams taking part, I am just happy to see some of the athletes who showed up, some of them have been through so much [since the passage of Hurricane Melissa], some of them might be coming from communities that still dont have electricity and I have members of my team that had their homes destroyed and are still yet to be relocated and the fact they are fighting and trying to keep up, from a humanitarian perspective, this meet was needed.”

Rhoando Parchment, head coach of Godfrey Stewart High, said the meet was vital to their programme.

“[The meet was] very instrumental in our preparation for Western Champs and the [ISSA] Champs mainly because we would have had to pay a lot of money. [It is a] really expensive venture to go into Kingston for every meet, [so it is beneficial] to have this meet in the western part of the island, only the second meet here for the year.

“I’m really happy that the organisers took the initiative to organise this meet, and I must commend the the whole organising body, because I think it’s a very good meet”.

Parchment, who also coached at Rhodes Hall High, said the events that were included on the schedule “catered for almost every aspects of the programme — jumps, throws, sprints, middle distance, that is really where my programme is focused around, and this meet has fostered to all areas that I would look for in a track meet.”

Mount Alvernia High runners dominated the Girls’ 200m, winning three of the four classes. Sharla Bell won Class 1, Gianna Murray won Class 2 and Veneisha Pottinger won Class 3, while Deborjah Morris, who ran unattached, won Class 4.

Cornwall College’s Requelma Reid won the Class 1 Boys’ race, Rusea’s High’s ISSA Champs finalist Tiene Barrett ran an impressive 21.75 seconds to win the Class 2 Boys’ event, while Godfrey Stewart High’s Nicholas James won the Class 3 race.

Cornwall College’s Zhi-Hew Whitter won the Boys’ Class 2 long jump with a personal best 6.81m, beating his teammate Andrew Reid, 6.40m with Quailan Brown of William Knibb third with 6.02m.

Cornwall College ran 43.37 seconds to win the Class 1 Boys’ 4x100m relay, just ahead of William Knibb Memorial’s 43.49 seconds, while the Trelawny school flipped the results in Classes 2 and 3.

Mt Alvernia High meanwhile swept all four Girls’ sprint relays, the 4x200m and 4x400m Open and William Knibb Memorial won both 1,600m Sprint Medley Relays as well as the Boys’ 4x400m Open.

MYLES… we had some really good races and we had some good quality teams taking part

PARCHMENT… it is a really expensive venture to go into Kingston for every meet, [so it is beneficial] to have this meet in the western part of the island