By Neto Baptiste
Former national track athlete and coach, Carl Casey, has taken aim at Ministry of Sports officials responsible for planning and executing the Schools Athletics Championships, and has labelled them “lazy” for not putting effort into planning the championships for a venue outside of the dilapidated YASCO Sports Complex.
“I am not going to make Mr Evans Jones and Mrs Heather Daley get away with this one,” he said. “I think we’re lazy because we could have had Inter-schools and it could have been a scaled down version so I am not going to sit back and hear Mr Jones say that the surface is not good. I think that Sir Viv stadium’s surface is better than Police Grounds and back in the day we had Inter-schools at Police Grounds and it’s the same thing at Recreation Grounds where we had Inter-schools there and it was a sand-based surface.”
Casey was, at the time, responding to statements by Deputy Director of Sports and a member of the committee that plans the annual event, Evan Jones, who said that outside of the YASCO Sports Complex, no other venue is suitable to host the championships.
“If [Princess Margaret School] could have their sports day up at the Stanford cricket ground [Coolidge Cricket Ground] then we could have had Inter-schools there but we are just lazy. It should be a problem that we don’t have YASCO, because when the track at YASCO is developed we can’t train on it every day and still use it as a competition track; it is going to be worn out,” the coach said.
The schools marquee event in athletics has not been hosted for the past three years owing to the unavailability of the facility which has been closed for refurbishing since 2017.