The Jamaica Volleyball Association (JaVA) has taken steps to introduce the sport to more primary schools, despite issues their lack of a dedicated training facility.

“It may sound like a broken record but its true, Jamaica has the talent, what we need is a bigger player pool and more players starting from earlier,” said Jacqueline Cowan, president of JaVA.

Cowan, who took over as president in 2020, and is the current first vice president of the Jamaica Olympic Association (JOA), said her main goal for her tenure is to raise the standards in organisation administration in Jamaica to the international standard and to introduce volleyball into more primary schools across the island by getting physical education (PE) teachers certified in coaching the game.

Volleyball has the largest sports federation in the world and Cowan has commended the strides Jamaica has made so far in integrating the sport into primary schools and creating a primary school league.

“Two hundred and twenty two countries in the world play volleyball and its usually cheaper than other sports to introduce in schools,” said Cowan.

“We want more schools to get involved. You don’t need special shoes or equipment, even if you don’t have a net you can tie something up and it can work, the only thing you’d really need is a ball and we’ve taken steps to ensure that every primary school that is interested in adopting the sport, we provide them with three balls, and we’ll help you train your PE teachers.”

It would be a big disservice to keep the option to learn volleyball in school away from young students. There are many scholarships available for student athletes in volleyball, over 15,000 volleyball scholarships are available to Jamaicans from the US alone.

“What’s hurting us right now isn’t a lack of talent, it’s our inability to train on a consistent basis,” said Cowan when referring to the training for the senior members.

“We lost two years due to COVID while many countries in Europe got to play, but, in addition to that, one of the issues is that the association doesn’t have its own facility to train consistently. What we do, due to the relationships that our coaches have, we utilise courts at UWI (University of the West Indies), Mico and GC Foster, but oftentimes other sporting clubs also use the venues and hurts our training,” she continued.

What is volleyball?

Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players separated by a net tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team’s court under organised rules. It has different forms – the most popular are indoor volleyball and beach volleyball. Jamaica plays both forms of the game and has senior and junior teams for both men and women.

Countries are grouped under different governing sports body with Jamaica falling under the North America Central America and the Caribbean Volleyball Confederation (NORCECA) and competes within the Caribbean Zonal Volleyball association (CAZOVA) alongside Barbados and Trinidad & Tobago.

The team’s next match will be at a men’s and women’s tournament in the Dominican Republic on September 29.

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