Schoolboy football refs fully vaxxed – Stewart
JAMAICA FOOTBALL Federation (JFF) Referee’s Department manager Victor Stewart says that their complement of officials for this schoolboy football season, which kicked off on Friday, have all been fully vaccinated.
Stewart says, however, that a large number of their lowerlevel referees are still inactive, and recruitment has not been possible for over a year due to the limited football activity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
But he says the refereeing pool still has enough manpower available to meet the demands of the schoolboy football season and the upcoming Jamaica Premier League competition.
“We have referees who are not vaccinated, and they know they could not participate because in order to participate and meet government protocols, they must be vaccinated,” Stewart said. “So the referees you are seeing on the field now are vaccinated referees. And we have had no problem in terms of the numbers thus far. Only a few of our panel referees are not vaccinated, but I have had commitments from the one or two dissidents who have not been vaccinated.”
In recent schoolboy seasons, there has been difficulty garnering the number of referees needed to meet the demands of the first round of DaCosta Cup matches, which usually had close to 100 teams participating.
However, a reduced number of teams in the competition this year because of the pandemic means the referees’ workload has lightened.
The JFF’s recruitment drive also continues to be stymied by the pandemic, as there are no opportunities to officiate at the lower levels.
However, with football slowly returning to full activity, Stewart, expects the dormant l ower league referees to return to boost the cohort of active officials.
“We have plans for recruitment starting January, but without football being played and everything on board, we could not reach out to the schools and other stakeholders to get numbers into the system. That was one of the biggest downfalls for us, so we are hopeful now that football is back,” he said.
“It will help to bring back a number of referees who had to find other ways of sustaining themselves during the [downtime] of football.
“So football coming back is a way for officials to return.”
Stewart says that while the the lower-level referees have been inactive, top local referees have been busy participating on the circuit, including the Concacaf Gold Cup, Concacaf League, and the Concacaf U-20 Men’s tournament.
‘We have referees who are not vaccinated, and they know they could not participate because in order to participate and meet government protocols, they must be vaccinated.’