Football coordinator pleads for principals’ support

Coordinator of Schools Football, Rowan “Porridge” Benjamin, has called on principals across the island to be more supportive of the sport as he prepares for the 2017 Secondary Schools Competition starting October 5.
A former national coach, Benjamin said some principals are not in favour of, not only football, but sports in general and won’t even allow their students to play matches outside of a specific time frame.
“In a secondary school we are at the mercy of the principal or even in the primary schools where if they decide they don’t want sports in the schools then what can we do. I can tell you that it’s a real challenge to play these matches because the principal would not allow that [matches being played at night]. They would not allow games to be played on a Saturday or after school hours like after 5 p.m. or anything like that because they are not in control of the situation and if anything should happen, no one would want to be held accountable for that,” he said.
Making his usual call for more coaches, Benjamin said the programme continues to be hampered by the limited contact time they share with players.
“The contact time with the athletes is something very big for us. We are trying to find out how we can have more contact time with the athletes. We can only see these athletes after school but we are trying to see if we can work out some way in terms of getting some coaching done during school hours but that’s still a long way,” the coordinator said.
The Liberta Blackhawks coach also revealed that they will discontinue the Super Six competition because of a number of issues.
“We thought that we could get some competitiveness whereby players would be playing at the top venue. We had some real issue with getting  the ABFA for the use of the ARG where we asked for our Super Six matches
to be played at the ARG on a particular day and it was turned down,” Benjamin said.
The Secondary Schools competition is expected to climax in December while the Primary Schools Competition kicks off in February.