?Queen’s College has a qualified team to create world-class athletes but they are hamstrung by a lack of facilities.
This was the frustration principal Dr David Browne expressed recently when teachers and school alumni celebrated passing the halfway mark of a $1.2 million fundraising drive – Give Back QC – for the construction of a pavilion. In particular they were giving thanks for support received in netting $120 000 from a January concert, SHINE The Event.
?“I don’t want to call it a pavilion because that connotes it is just for cricket,”?Browne said. “We call it a sports facility because we have an idea of a facility that will do a multi-purpose number of things.”
He explained that the vision was for the establishment of a complex with facilities enabling highly-trained instructors to bring out the best in the students.
“In other words, you can run up there now and the fellas can look at you and tell you what’s wrong, fix it on camera, and show you your muscles that need adjustment,” he said.
Browne was speaking to SUNSPORT after alumni and school board representatives, and Minister of Education Ronald Jones bemoaned that the school was without even the most basic form of accommodation to support its playing field.
The chairperson of the fund-raising committee, Vivian-Anne Gittens, said this had been the case since the school moved to Husbands, St James, in 1990.
All it has to show is an overgrown concrete edifice – a pavilion started and abandoned in 1991.
“We want to move to that scientific level to prepare students and not just have students run,” Browne said.
“So the sports facility will cater to the development of technique and the endurance of the students because we have the qualified staff to do that. But because we don’t have the facility we can’t do those things now.”
One consequence of the lack of facilities is that the Barbados Cricket Association limits the school to one team in domestic competitions.
“We have a lot of good players but because we can only select 11. It’s difficult [for them all] to make one team,” cricket coach Ryan Holford said.
“We’re leaving out a lot of guys, like Roy Williams who is in the Barbados developmental programme. Those guys didn’t even come into consideration, to some degree, and they are in the Barbados developmental programme,”?he added
Evan Grant, who was omitted for some games, captained a Barbados Under-14 team on a tour of England. Some QC students opt to play for clubs rather than in the Goddard Enterprises Schools’ competition in which the school now plays.
“The BCA tells us if we don’t win the School Zone [competition] we would not be promoted,” Holford said. “But it means we would have to keep all these players here in order to win the School Zone, and it won’t be helping them. They aren’t going to develop.”
