ISSA President Keith Wellington has praised the resilience of student-athletes at the ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships (Champs) this year.

Wellington mentioned the effort of those who have overcome major setbacks to make it to the National Stadium.

This year’s staging of Champs comes just months after Hurricane Melissa disrupted lives across western Jamaica, impacting many school sports. Only 25 schools from the region are competing this year. Some programmes have been put on hold, while others have been forced to scale back after losing students, who relocated to other parishes to live with family.

With that in mind, simply getting to Champs has been a challenge for many.

Yet, despite those hurdles, the level of competition has remained strong. This is something Wellington says he expected, given the response in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.

“I didn’t expect much different in terms of performances because I would’ve seen the response right after the hurricane and known that they were basically in the middle of everything,” he told the Jamaica Observer. “I would’ve recognised that persons were making a really, really big effort to ensure that the students are not disenfranchised from a track and field perspective.”

Wellington, principal at St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS), says several affected schools made a conscious decision to focus their limited resources on a smaller group of athletes, particularly those in their final year.

“I think many of the schools that were affected took the position that they would scale down in terms of numbers but they would ensure that the most talented students in their final year, they would’ve helped them to recover a bit quicker,” he said. “So, I think that there are some of them who are a little behind, still in terms of preparation, but you can see the effort.”

That effort has shown on the track.

Shanoya Douglas, of Holland High in Trelawny, clocked the fourth-fastest time on the national junior women’s 100m list, clocking 10.98 seconds on Wednesday to win the Class One Girls’ event. Sydney Pagon STEM Academy’s (from St Elizabeth) Annataseca Blackwood also broke the Western Champs Class One Girls’ 1,500m record earlier this season, clocking 4:56.60 minutes, lowered that personal best on Wednesday to 4:45.43 seconds took take a silver medal.

STETHS’ Anastacia Richards won the Class Four Girls’ long jump with 5.46m, barely short of her personal best of 5.47m, which gave her gold at Western Champs.

Brandon Lawrence of Munro College (St Elizabeth) also threw a personal best of 18.40m to win the Class Two Boys’ shot put on Thursday.

While Wellington is pleased with these performances, he’s also thankful that the number of incidents of equipment failure, especially starter equipment, has been significantly reduced this year.

“It’s been fairly steady, steady proceedings in terms of some of the issues we had last year,” he said. “We don’t seem to have that many this year. I’m happy that there’s some improvement. I think we had a very good day yesterday [Thursday] in terms of some of the performances on the track. And I think we’re building up nicely going into the weekend.”

WELLINGTON…I think many of the schools that were affected took the position that they would scale down in terms of numbers but they would ensure that the most talented students in their final year, they would’ve helped them to recover a bit quicker