The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

THE Queen’s College Comets celebrated the start of a new era as the curtain came down on the 27th edition of the Bahamas Independent Secondary School’s’ Track and Field Championships on Friday. The Comets’ victory signalled the end of the domination of the St Augustine College ‘Big Red Machine’ since the inception of the event in 1988.

Principal Andrea Gibson said the dethroning of the champions for 26 consecutive years at the Thomas A Robinson Stadium makes Queen’s College celebrations of their 125th anniversary this year that much sweeter.

Their 150.50 points victory over SAC - (1,408.50 to 1,258) - puts a huge asterisk in their history book. But Gibson added her own spin on their fantastic accomplishment.

“I’m excited, I’m grateful, I’m proud and I must commend all of our students, students who are with us today, students who were with us in the past, our alumnis, coaches and parents,” she said as the celebrations started on the track right after the completion of the of the senior boys 4 x 400 metres relay.

“We’re going to celebrate. Just stay tuned. We’re celebrating 125 years as of January 13 as the oldest private school in the country providing quality education. This year we got the best academic achievements of all the schools and this is just another achievement to add to our list of successes.”

Gibson said a teacher so aptly coined a new phrase for Queen’s College that they will be using on their new Comets’ banner - A&A, Academics and Athletics.

“I have to commend the other schools for their performances as well. It couldn’t just be Queen’s College. They all helped to make this so special for us,” she said. “But of course, we have to thank St Augustine’s College especially because we’ve had a heated rivalry with them for so long.”

Garry Markham, the head of the Athletic Department at Queen’s College, said it was long overdue. Over the past decade, the Comets have been building their programme and were knocking on the door. This year, they finally made their breakthrough.

“Twenty-six years is a long time coming,” he pointed out. “I’ve been at Queen’s College for the past 12 years and over the past eight years, I’ve watched what SAC has done and today was just an amalgamation of our athletics team. We have a great crop of kids, who all pulled together with heart. It was a great team spirit. All of our athletes have been here for years, so it’s not like we get a new crop of athletes. We’ve just grown together and worked together and with the coaching staff and administration, it all came together for us this year.”

Within the past decade, the Comets’ athletic team brought in Everette Fraser, who took over as the head coach of the track team, and they slowly worked on putting the pieces together with their various coaches, like Carrington Maycock and Ronald Cartwright in the field events, and the transformation started to take place.

“Our field events really did it for us,” Fraser reflected. “We knew we were going to do very well in the track events, especially in the relays where the points doubled, but our weakest areas was our throws and this year, the throwers came through for us and that was what we needed.”

Now it’s on to the ScotiaBank/BTC National High School Track and Field Championships this week, but Fraser said they won’t be putting any pressure on their athletes because he know they are tired and still in a celebratory mood because this was the biggest track meet for Queen’s College this year.

The Comets, in the process of achieving their success, lost a key component when senior boys’ sprinter Samson Colebrooke suffered a hamstring injury and had to sit out the rest of the competition. He won’t be available this week for the Nationals and will probably also not compete at Carifta.

But there were some other highlights for Queen’s College, led by versatile senior girls Janae Ambrose, who had a dominating performance to end her BAISS appearances.

“I feel good about it, especially with this being my last year,” Ambrose reflected. “We had some very good performances. We did better than we expected and I’m just proud of my team and I’m glad that we did it in my final year.”

As the Nationals approach, Ambrose said she has a couple of goals, which include qualifying for the Carifta Games in St Kitts and Nevis over the Easter weekend and her Comets team not only winning, but their relay teams earning their berths to go to the Penn Relays as the national champions.

The future looks even brighter for Queen’s College with young stars like Bronson Rolle still having a couple more years left.

“I feel extremely happy.This win was a long time coming. Everybody in QC is happy about this, especially our principal,” Rolle pointed out. “I can’t say I expected us to perform as well as we did, but I was hoping for it. Overall, I think we did extremely well.”

As for himself, the modest 16-year-old Rolle couldn’t have felt more pleased with his accomplishments.

“I qualified for Carifta in the high jump. I didn’t expect that at all,” noted the 10th grader as he looks to duplicate his feat this weekend at the Nationals. “So this meet was a very good meet for me.”

SAC’s head coach William ‘Knucklehead’ Johnson said they have no excuses. They simply got beaten by a well-prepared QC team.

“We fell short, especially on the field and in particular the high jump area,” Johnson said. “They jumped on us with 26 quick points and we could have done a little better in some of our track events, but they were just too strong in so many events.”

And it didn’t help that the Big Red Machine were without versatile senior girl Keianna Albury, who didn’t complete because of an injury.

But Tito Moss, a former distance runner who has worked tirelessly as a member of the coaching staff, said the loss will only rejuvenate SAC for the future.

“We know that we have a very good core of athletes. There were some areas that we fell down in and that we feel we can work on and improve in and we will do just that,” he insisted. “We will make those adjustments wherever necessary.

“But hats off to Queen’s College. They were a very good team. They executed well, but we need to look within and see where we need to counteract what they did. We are St Augustine’s College. We will never lay down and quit. We are SAC-ers for life.”

That resurgence may start this weekend at the Nationals and look for SAC to be back on track in 2016 to reclaim their BAISS title.