The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

THE inaugural National High School Soccer Championships, featuring the top senior boys and girls teams from New Providence and Grand Bahama, will be more than just a week-long competition. Bahamas Football Association assistant secretary general Adam Miller is calling it a celebration of Bahamian soccer players.

The girls’ and boys’ championship teams from both the Government Secondary Schools Sports Association, the Bahamas Association of Independent Secondary Schools and the Grand Bahama Schools Sports Association will secure their berths in the tournament scheduled to be held April 25-30 at the Baillou Hills Sporting Complex.

A knockout game will be played only between the runners-up from the GSSSA and the BAISS to determine the other boys and girls teams who will complete the package. It should be noted that only the championship teams from Grand Bahama will be attending the tournament, all expenses paid by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

“Soccer, as a sport, has been played in the Bahamas since the 1920s when returning World War veterans would have organised friendly games among themselves when they returned from Europe,” said Evon Wisdom, who heads the Sports Division at the Ministry of Education.

“I want to emphasise the date 1920. This is now 2016. The club structure is flourishing, however, my department or the ministry’s goal, is for the schools soccer system to flourish. For a long period of time, the Bahamas Football Association has been blamed for many of the woes that occurred in soccer, but much to their credit as a body, I don’t know if they have had the full participation in regards to all the things that we can do with the school system.”

Wisdom congratulated BFA’s president Anton Sealey and his executives, represented at the press conference by Miller and Carl Lynch, an advisor, for their efforts in helping to facilitate the nationals, which is expected to become a hallmark on the local calender as it is with basketball and athletics.

Miller, the liaison person for the BFA for the nationals, advised that there will be three days of match play with the final being contested on Saturday.

“Ideally for our first championships, we want to be inclusive as possible, but we know that there are are islands and leagues in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas that may not be up to the required level or standard that we might deem appropriate to name a champion,” he said. “Those are areas that we definitely want to develop.

“But to set a platform for them to strive towards, we want to use the two school leagues in New Providence as well as the school league within Grand Bahama as the starting point and from there we will branch off into other islands and develop their leagues and eventually have a proper inter-island championship.”

The championships will be a single elimination format with the teams winning advancing until the champion is decided. The games are expected to begin around 4pm during the week so that they can accommodate more support in the stands rather than during the school hours.

The opening round will be contested 4pm Monday for the girls and 5:30pm for the boys with the semi-final on Thursday, starting at 4pm and the final on Saturday at 2pm for the girls and 3:45pm for the boys. There will also be a third-place game played in both divisions and that will be staged on Saturday at 10am for the girls and 11:20am for the boys.

Lynch said the nationals is long overdue and they look forward to making the event a grand success.

“We don’t want to look back, but this is a step in the right direction to open up a lot of avenues for our soccer athletes,” Lynch said. “If we are honest with ourselves, on a number of our national teams, soccer athletes make up a huge number of those teams, whether it’s track and field, basketball, softball or volleyball, you have soccer athletes.

“Now the push is let us give our soccer athletes a chance to shine. This is a step in the right direction. It has the full support of the Bahamas Football Association and the ministry obviously. We have some opportunities for kids to be seen in the playoff schedule. So we are going to do whatever we can to make sure that it succeeds.”

The nationals comes on the heels of both the national basketball championships that was held last month in Grand Bahama and the National High School chamionships in Grand Bahama as well from Monday to Wednesday.

The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture facilitated the two nationals respectively.