Inter-Primary Schools Championship kicks off today

The preliminary round of the 2020 Digicel Inter-Primary Schools Championship is set to commence at the AO Shirley Recreational Grounds today, March 4, with a number of new additions to the junior-level sporting event.

Speaking at a recent media conference, Director of Youth Affairs & Sports, Brenda Lettsome-Tye said the primary school competition — which is expected to have between 16 to 20 schools competing this year — will be moving away from the previous Division-A and Division-B winners format.

“After much discussion with the stakeholders, we decided that as a territory we had reached the stage where the ‘championship format’ is now necessary at this foundational level … The introduction of a championship format will bring the best out of our young student-athletes,” Director Lettsome-Tye said.

“The athletes will compete over a period of two days. Day-one, which are the semi-finals, will be held on March 11 and day-two the finals, on March 12 at the AO Shirley grounds,” she added.

High jump event returned

In the meantime, Coordinator of the Inter-Primary School Sports Competition, Eustace Freeman, announced that the high jump event will be making a return to the competition this year. 

That event is open to Under-11 student-athletes as well as those in older age categories. 

“We kind of went away from high jump for couple years because of equipment, but we were able to have high jump beds back at the facility and we have actually as a department ran some high jump and long jump programmes to make sure that our youths are up to par,” Freeman explained.

Digicel bringing the action to Sportsmax

Meanwhile, Timothy Barker who is the Marketing Executive of the events platinum sponsor, Digicel, said his company is working to bring coverage of the championships either live or on-demand on their Sportsmax app.

He said once it is on-demand, persons who may have missed any day of events will be able to log into the app at any given time to replay the full broadcasting.