Davis promises to bring creativity to JAAA
FORMER UNIVERSITY of Technology (UTech) Sports Director Anthony Davis is hoping to inject a creative management style into the Jamaica Administrative Athletics Association (JAAA) over the next four years to help it better serve its stakeholders.
Davis, a former athlete who has served athletics in various capacities for over four decades, is seeking to become the general secretary of the association as the post has been made vacant by Garth Gayle, who is running for president in the upcoming elections in November.
Davis, a UTech graduate, told The Gleaner that he can take credit for advancing officiating in Jamaica in more than one instance and that it is on that record that he believes that he can continue to make track and field better in Jamaica.
“When I studied, I did land surveying, and I got my surveying colleagues to come over into track and field and introduce the use of EDM (electromagnetic distance measuring) equipment,” he said. “I thought from back in the ‘90’s that we shouldn’t be stretching a tape to measure distances, and so I was the one who introduced the surveyors to the sport.
“When we started doing automatic timing, we brought someone from overseas who was doing the timing for us, and I said to him,‘The timing is one thing, but how we data-link the entries to the timing to get FAT (fully automatic timing) [is another].’
“And he said, ‘I knew a man who has written a [computer] programme’, and I got in touch with the person and brought him here, and that was when we first linked data with timing to get FAT, and so we were good as anywhere in the world.”
Davis, who is running as an independent, believes that he can still use his creativity to advance track and field. If elected, he promises to push for the association to have better relationships with the major universities in Jamaica to serve the nation’s athletes.
“We have to have linkages with our universities because in everything we do, there has to be research and development,” Davis said. “UWI (University of the West Indies, Mona) has a sports medicine programme that we should be working on to make sure that they have a database so that if a coach in Montego Bay has an athlete who has an injury, the people from sports medicine can make recommendations on how to treat it. The universities are also offering sports management programmes to their students.
We could get some of them to intern at the JAAA so that we could get assistance to get things done.”
Davis is the only person who has indicated that he wants to fill the post of general secretary.
Earlier this week, it was announced that Donald Quarrie, the 200m champion at the Montreal Olympics in
1976, will be challenging Gayle for the post of president of the association.
The elections are set for November 28 during the JAAA’s annual general meeting.