Editorial | What are Champs’ lessons for education, economy?

There are several significant observations from last week’s annual Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships (Champs). After its cancellation in 2020, and last year without spectators, the joyous return of the crowds to the National Stadium enhanced the beauty of the athletes in contest.

It was also a reminder of the singularity of this event. For there can hardly be any high-school sport anywhere in the world that draws such intensity and where the athletes, as a class, perennially perform to standards generally beyond their global peers.

This year, for instance, within 24 hours, Hydel High School’s Kerrica Hill equalled, and then broke, the world record for under-18 girls in the 100 metres hurdles. And a record-breaking run in the 200 metres (22.53 seconds), plus her imperious destruction of the field, coming well behind the leaders to anchor Hydel High School’s senior girls to victory in the 4x400 relay, clearly marked Brianna Lyston as one of Jamaica’s next great athletes. There were more than whispered comparisons, about form, style and talent, between Miss Lyston and the great Merlene Ottey.

It boggles the mind, too, that even with two fumbling handovers of the baton, Edwin Allen High School’s senior female quartet (17-18 age group), including the Clayton twins, Tina and Tia (first and third in the 100 metres), set a new high-school world record of 43.28 seconds in the 4x100 metres. The previous record (44.17) was held by the same school.

GREAT PROMISE

Nothing, of course, is guaranteed, but these and other performances, including by young men such as Bryan Levell, Mark Anthony Miller, and Roshawn Clarke, provide our first takeaway: that the future of Jamaica’s track and field athletics is in the hands of great promise.

But these championships provoke deeper questions about what accounts for the consistently high standards of Champs, and why a country of only three million people is a global leader in track athletics – and, increasingly, in some of the field events.

One obvious answer is tradition. The Boys’ Championships are more than 100 years old. That for girls is 65. Further, Jamaica has been producing world champions on the track since the London Olympics in 1948.

Additionally, affinity to the old school ties helps to ensure not only the intensity of Champs, but economic support for expensive high-school track and field programmes.

That, however, is unlikely to be the whole story. Among the other factors to be explored is the impact of the four-decades-old G.C. Foster College for Physical Education & Sport on the athletics ecosystem and the quality of track and field organisation/management in Jamaica.

Well before G.C. Foster, there were highly skilled athletics coaches in the island, and many of the current talented coaches didn’t attend that institution. But G.C. Foster has allowed a wider distribution of qualified coaches across the school system, with clearly discernible outcomes.

Indeed, even the youngest performers, who are merely at play, are likely to show good basic running form, imparted by their physical education teachers. By the time these children come to be prepared for organised competition, they are well-prepared to absorb higher-level instructions. Which cannot be said for other areas of education. Indeed, at the early-childhood level, a fifth of children display deficiencies that put them at a disadvantage at the primary level. And around a third of primary-school children enter high school ill-prepared for that level of education.

BIGGEST AND BEST-KNOWN

Champs is the biggest and best-known of these athletics competitions. However, there are several others at regional and national levels, organised by age, school type, and other categories. And they are mostly very well run.

Seventy schools and several hundred athletes participate in Champs. They compete in 88 events (42 boys; 46 girls), most of which have preliminary rounds. Champs operates in accordance with all the rules of global athletics, and its operating standards are benchmarked against the best in class worldwide. Champs, therefore, requires skilled logistical planning and adept execution for it to be successful. Which the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association is able to accomplish year after year, with large amounts of voluntary help.

This is counterintuitive to what might be expected in an economy where productivity, over the past 40 years, has declined by around one per cent annually and there is the assumption that anything that demands structure and order is never consistently well done. Champs and athletics underline two things: Jamaica is a global leader in the latter; and second, we are more than capable at logistics.

These conclusions raise two more intriguing questions, or possibilities. What if Jamaica could transfer the lessons from the management of Champs to the general economy? Second, suppose it could marry those lessons with the intensity of our support for athletics and apply them to the broader education system?

Or to pose the issue a different way: Is there a difference between how someone is trained at G.C. Foster, whose job will essentially be to impart knowledge, and a classroom teacher who graduates from a traditional teachers’ college? There is a view that an average school athletics coach has a better grasp of her subject than other teachers do theirs.

Maybe among all the other analyses being undertaken with respect to the reform of Jamaica’s education system, we might, even at this stage, add to them case studies on our approach to sport in schools and the logistical management of Champs. The general economy, too, might benefit from these.