Jamaican High School Championships

The ISSA Grace Kennedy Boys and Girls Championships (better known as Champs) is an annual Jamaican multi-sport high school athletics meet held by Jamaica’s Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association. The five day event, held during the last week before Easter in Kingston, has been considered a proving ground for many successful Jamaican athletes.

The Championships began as a standardized sports day for six of Jamaica’s oldest high schools, Potsdam (now Munro College), St. George’s College, Jamaica College, the Wolmer’s School, New College and Mandeville Middle Grade School. Originally known as the Inter-Secondary School Championship Sports, rules and staging of the event were managed by an Organizing Committee comprising the headmasters of the six boys’ schools and was first chaired by William Cowper, headmaster of Wolmer’s. A cadre of volunteers consisting of coaches, sports masters and others served as timekeepers, starters, referees and other meet officials.

The first Boys’ Champs began just after noon at test cricket ground Sabina Park on June 29, 1910, in Kingston, Jamaica. Loosely modeled after the school athletic sports at British public schools such as Eton and Harrow, the event quickly gained popularity among Jamaica’s sport-loving public. Over six previous years, fans had attended a boys’ track meet in which athletes were given handicaps according to age, reputation and overall appearance – as in a horse race – but this format was discontinued in 1910 when new rules and a new trophy were introduced.

There is evidence of a Girls’ Athletics Championships as early as 1914 in Kingston, but after reemerging under different organizations in the 1940s, 1957, then 1961, the girls’ event had an unbroken run since being managed by the Games Mistresses Association (founded 1963), a national organization of physical education teachers.

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