KC romps home 34th title, Hydel snatches first on dramatic last day at Champs 2023

ByIanBurnettCNWSportsWriter

Kingston College (KC) streaked away to comfortably win their 34th Mortimer Geddes Trophy, but it went down to the last girls’ race of the 2023

ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys’ and

Girls’ Athletics Championships for Hydel High School to narrowly secure its first-ever title

At the end of the 42 events scored, KC widened the lead to 67 points to finish on 366, with Jamaica College (JC) ending on 299, followed by Calabar High School on 207, St Jago High School on 118 5, and St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) rounding out the top five on 116 points

On the girls’ side after 46 events scored, Hydel High School who first entered Champs in 2010 ended with 279 points, followed by dethroned champions Edwin Allen High School on 277, followed by Holmwood Technical High School with 202, St Jago High School on 178 and St Catherine High School completing the top five on 116 points

The five-day championships were held inside Kingston’s National Stadium and KC’s head coach Leaford Grant had no doubt his team would have walked away with the main prize despite the many predictions which claimed a close title fight

“Well, I don’t know about it being close, what we have seen is that it was not close I don’t understand all these predictions so far,” noted Grant

He added: “We calculated a certain amount of points and never thought that it would have been a two-point [result], I don’t know where they got that from ”

Grant said the aim was to score over 350 points and “ we knew any other team covered more than that we suspect that we would just have said they won the championships”

The head coach added that this year ’ s win was “ a more challenging one for us as we had to make some crucial decisions at certain times of the track season Gibson Relays was one of them and we had to pull some teams and managed our boys properly going through the season, so we had some quality but we never had a lot of quantity in terms of the boys that we had this year so we had to manage them properly at these championships”

For Hydel’s head coach Corey Bennett, who has been with the team since it started participating in the competition in 2010, it was all the work of the Almighty