Sport as a nation-builder

On the track at the National Athletics Championships

This is not the first time that we have engaged our readers on ‘school sports.’ It is a repetitive rendition of the mediocrity that passes for sports at the school level, its absurdity growing more prominent in direct proportion to the advances in school-level sports that obtain in other CARICOM countries, Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago being among the primary examples.

The problem is that sports in our school system has become a directionless routine, a distraction from the classroom and an opportunity to churn out hard-earned but pointless performances in track and field, delivered in significantly sub-standard if not wholly inadequate playfields that mostly facilitate grazing cattle which, during the rainy seasons leave behind cavities on the lands they occupy that can inflict terrible injuries on the athletes.