Grand Slam Track to set up high school top eight clashes

The organisers of the Grand Slam Track series, which will start in Kingston in April, are proposing a face-off between the top eight fastest runners in three events at the ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships, as part of their schedule.

The top eight fastest runners in the 100m, 200m and 400m for both boys and girls at ‘Champs, regardless of age group, would be invited to face off against each other at the Grand Slam event, which will be held a week after Champs, according to Don Lockerbie, venue manager for Grand Slam Track.

The proposal was made on Wednesday during a meeting between ISSA, high school coaches and Irwine Claire, CEO of Team Jamaica Bickle, to start planning for schools taking part in the annual Penn Relays to be held in Philadelphia in late April.

Lockerbie, a former athlete and coach at the NCAA level in the USA, said they were still going through the planning stages but thought the event could help to enhance the sport here in Jamaica and also would be shown during their broadcast to over 100 countries.

Additionally, he said they were also working with ISSA to come up with suitable incentives for those who took part in the six races planned.

The plan could potentially set up another clash between Lacovia High’s Sabrina Dockery, who is in Class 1, and Muschett High’s Shanoya Douglas, who is in Class 2, after they shared victories in the 100m and 200m, respectively, in the Under-20 sprints at last weekend’s Carifta Trials held at GC Foster.

Lockerbie said he had lived in Jamaica for six years during which time he got a first-hand knowledge of the impact of the ISSA Champs.

“While it is the most incredible high school, secondary school athletics competition in the world, you don’t have the same schools where the best athletes are necessarily racing each other. There’s age group and there are classifications of schools. So you may find that the best girls’ 100m runner is 15, but she won’t run against the 17 and 18 year olds, or she’s in a smaller school, or whatever. So one of the things we thought about, knowing that we’re the very next week, is we would like to add a boys’ and girls’ 100m, a boys’ and girls’ 200m, and a boys’ and girls’ 400m to Grand Slam Track the very next weekend,” said Lockerbie.

He said the plan was to take the best eight in each event across the age groups from ‘Champs, “and let them toe the line and race the following Saturday,” adding that it was understood that some of the athletes, for more than one reason, would not be available.

“We know that some athletes will choose not to, we hope that the top eight would all say yes but if we perhaps look at the top 12 or 16 athletes from the Champs competition, we’ll go in order of performance until we get eight,” he noted.

Lockerbie said they would give the teenagers a taste of what it’s like to run in the professional setting.

“What we’d want to do is treat those eight in each event as if they were experiencing Champs the way the professionals will. We’ll have them be dropped off at the athletes’ hotel, they’ll get their credentials, we would have gift bags, we would bus them over to our drop-off area at the Stadium East, they would go through our medical facilities, our call rooms and make their way down the tunnel to the track and race.”

The schedule is still being worked on he also said, adding, “because of contractual obligations, we would have the races run before we go on live on worldwide TV, but we would absolutely film all the races. You know, when you add up those six races, it only adds up to about six, about three minutes total, of actual racing. So we would absolutely want to put the content of those racers, of those races, into our worldwide broadcast, our broadcast team would figure out when they might want to talk about the races that happened before we went live on air.”

Incentives, he said, would also be part of the deal.

“While we haven’t finalised all the incentives, I’ll be having meetings in the next week with our team about what we might do in the way of awards, and we think that the awards might be cash contributions that we would give to the schools through ISSA that might be helpful for some of the athletes who are going to Penn [Relays], we would help, I think, by some form of an awards plan. But we would also know that some schools may not be going to Penn, or some of those athletes may not go into Penn, so it would still be able to go to the track and field programme at the schools that perform well, where the kids perform well.”