Photo by Anthony Foster
Ventley Brown ... The main focus is to recruit athletes and get qualified and technical coaches for the various sports.

Anthony Foster, Gleaner Writer

IN A move to produce more sporting stars, G.C. Foster College of Physical Education and Sports has appointed an athletics director.

Ventley Brown, a former administrative assistant, has been given the task to oversee and implement strategies for the college's entire sports programme.

In the most recent inter-collegiate season, G.C. Foster participated in track and field, football, basketball, hockey and cricket. It lost the female track and field title to UTech for the first time since 1980, while the male team also had its winning streak, of five years, broken.

The institution also has teams in badminton and table tennis leagues.

In a recent interview with Brown, who is also manager of the track and field team, he spoke of his various roles.

"The main focus is to recruit athletes and get qualified and technical coaches for the various sports," Brown said, adding that "monitoring athletes' grades, nutrition and health will also be a part of my job."

Seek sponsorship

He will also seek sponsorship, market the college and its multi-purpose facilities, which cater for several sports including netball, track and field, basketball, cricket, table tennis, volleyball, boxing, rugby and soon, swimming.

According to Brown, the idea is to "Rent the facilities ... to solicit funds to help with tuition for students".

Upgrading facilities

He said there was some demands for the facilities, but most users were government institutions.

"We offer the facilities, but it must be at a charge and you must respect the fact that it's at a charge," Brown said.

Most of the facilities, he said, were in need of upgrading or repair.

"We want to get the stands at the track up," he said while disclosing that the track itself needed repairing. "The track is there now but, within a year, we probably won't have any track. From the 800m start, the section of lanes one and two are totally rubbed out and another section of the track is being lifted up.

"We need a track, but the institution cannot manage to replace it so it must be a governmental or agency issue," he said of the track, which is the most heavily used in the island.

"We also need the stands we were promised two to three years ago," he said, explaining that Olivia 'Babsy' Grange, Minister of Sports and MP for the area, had promised it would be up shortly.

The track had two stands but they were destroyed by Hurricane Ivan.

Work to be done

As for the cricket field, which is used almost every week, Brown said discussions were taking place with the Jamaica Cricket Association (JCA) and Gibbs Williams, a lecturer at the college, for stands to be installed.

As for the barren swimming pool, he said: "We fell short on some funds but the Sports Development Foundation (SDF) promised to deliver on that, so I think this should be up and running soon".

Some work has been done thanks to GlaxoSmithKline, which has donated $1.3 million over the past year. Brown praised the efforts of GlaxoSmithKline.

"It is the only corporate company that embraced us over the years, in terms of sponsors for athletes and other developments at the institution. "We get help from SDF to help with the sport programme, which is very good, but we need some more corporate support".

Brown also said GlaxoSmithKline was planning to sponsor some G.C. Foster athletes on a monthly basis.

At the just concluded Beijing Olympics, G.C. Foster had three members of Jamaica's team - national 400m champion Rosemarie White, Bobbie-Gaye Wilkins and Anastasia Le-Roy.

Marketing strategies

Brown said the college would try to take advantage of that achievement in its marketing strategies.

"We realise the more you market, the more persons will come on board. So, we plan on doing magazines and calendars with the athletes' photos and also the sporting facilities to get out there," he said.

Brown believes the impact G.C. Foster College makes on sports in Jamaica is second to none.

"If you look at the high schools, most of them have some impact from G.C. Foster because the PE teachers are from here.

"And if you look at 99 per cent of the performances at Boys' and Girls' Champs, all the big coaches are G.C. Foster graduates - Raymond 'KC' Graham, Michael Dyke, Michael Clarke, Maurice Wilson, among many others, so it means something."