UWI and UTech combine for joint champs

Photo credit: Norman Grindley/Jamaica Gleaner

Now this is what you call a good idea whose time has come.

Jamaica (and the Caribbean's) two biggest universities, University of the West Indies, Mona and the University of Technology, are getting together for a joint sports championship series.

The event, the UWI-UTech Sports Championship, is set for September 18th at the Mona campus. Athletes from the two tertiary institutions will compete in Twenty20 cricket, women's volleyball, men's basketball, fastnet netball and men's football.

UTech's director of sports, the visionary Anthony Davis, explained that the aim of the joint meet was to lay the foundation for a genuinely competitive intercollegiate system that would induce student athletes to stay in tertiary education.

"We have a very elaborate high school system but over the years when they (students) graduate, a lot of them will stop playing sports and a minuscule number will get scholarships to go overseas. If we are to continue maintaining the level of success that we are experiencing now in track and field and football, or even cricket, we must have a developed collegiate system, which is the natural step after high school for persons to come into the collegiate system,"

Davis told the Gleaner at the launch.

As far as CSL is concerned, this is a brilliant move. As Davis rightly pointed out, not every talented athlete is going to get an athletics scholarship in the States, especially when  you consider they are competing against thousands of other athletes in the US and from around the world. Which means that hundreds of talented kids - Carifta gold medal winners, genuinely promising athletes, fall through the cracks.

So kudos to UWI and UTech for this initiative - may it go from strength to strength.