Youth Athletic Development in Jamaica
Most Jamaican schools have an athletics program in the curriculum, so Jamaican children are into athletics at a young age. Budding young athletes have to impress at primary school level as this can get them recognised by good athletics schools like St. Jago High, Kingston College and Vere Technical High. The most important athletics event in Jamaica is the VMBS Boys and Girls Athletics Championships (colloquially known simply as 'Champs') which began in 1910 at Sabina Park and were won by Wolmer's High School. These championships are a chance for athletes under 19 to show off their talents to national and overseas coaches. The championships are incredibly popular in Jamaica and the athletes are normally competing to crowds of 20-25,000 people, which is good preparation for major championships and some of the championship records are world class. The championships are the climax of a series of athletics meetings for under-19s in Jamaica, and this is similar to the grand prix series whose climax is normally a major championships in Senior athletics. Dominant athletes are normally picked for the Penn Relays, a competition where the best Jamaican schools and universities compete against American counterparts. Herb McKenley entered the first Jamaican high school team into the Penn Relays in 1964; since then, Jamaicans have won more than half the events.
Read more about this topic: Athletics In Jamaica
Famous quotes containing the words youth, athletic, development and/or jamaica:
“From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“To be sure, we have inherited abilities, but our development we owe to thousands of influences coming from the world around us from which we appropriate what we can and what is suitable to us.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)