Latest ÐÓ°ÉÐÔ°É
Winner takes all! - Million-dollar cash prize for high school football competition in western Jamaica
June 10, 2025
Montego Bay United Football Club (MBUFC) will be staging its inaugural invitational high school football competition at the Montego Bay Sports Complex in Catherine Hall on Saturday, August 16, before the opening of the schoolboy football season in September.
The director of the MBUFC youth academy, Leacroft Lettman, said the competition is to highlight the talent in the region.
The MBUFC is targeting schools out west because they want to establish a feeder programme for its senior team.
"This tournament will help to display the talent from the youths. Whatever talent is shown, we can bring them back to MBU for growth and give them that experience with the combination of the senior players," Lettman told STAR Sports.
"What you do in the first and last 20 minutes in football playing moments might help the teams build. This can be used as preparation for coaches going into the daCosta Cup season," Lettman continued.
He reasoned that the feedback has been positive among stakeholders.
"We want to bring back the glory days of football in the west," declared Letttman. "We have reached out to some schools and coaching staff, and they are buzzing with excitement."
MBUFC's chairman, Yoni Epstein, says as the only Jamaica Premier League (JPL) club in the region, they are hosting the tournament to support youth development and growth through sports.
"Development and growth through the youth is our number one sustainability for the club and its future. We wanted to host an invitational football tournament on the cusp of the start of the schoolboy season, where we invited the best six teams here," said Epstein, who is also the director of Multi-Sports Development Limited (MBMSDL).
"This is part the reason MBMSDL has gone after the Catherine Hall stadium, because we need to keep events like this all the time there," added Esptein, who is expected to make the tournament an annual event for the club.
The one-day competition will serve as part of the pre-season football, as the teams strive for game-preparation mode.
Competition includes 40-minute matches, with the six teams broken down into two groups of three. Each team will play each other in a group round-robin format, and the top two from each group will advance to the semi-finals. The group winners will face each other in the final.
Adding more fun to the mix, the MBU youth academy will also play a match against another opponent during intermission before the final game.
Some of the schools being targeted are Cornwall College, Rusea's High, Herbert Morrison Technical High School and St Elizabeth Technical High School.
Admission fee for the event is, VIP tickets are $2,000, and grandstand $1,500.
