NAPSAC gets a green light for 2021!

National Primary Schools Athletics Championship (NAPSAC) has been given the green light for 2021 and will be staged from February in a revised format.

The news of NAPSAC going ahead was disclosed at a media conference held at the Barbados Union of Teachers by chairman of the NAPSAC Mona Alleyne and the details delivered by Janelle Denny, meet director.

The championships, which will be staged on February 15-19, and February 23-26, will now have eight (8) zones up from five (5) zones due to the organisers looking to make the Zones smaller.

As a result, all the schools will be placed in a pool and the Physical Education Teachers will make a draw to determine who goes where on January 6th.

The semi-finals are slated for March 5 and the final is scheduled for March 16.

Denny said that some hard decisions had to be made in order to stage the event and they will be revising it if necessary for future years.

As they seek to have manageable numbers, each zone will have ten schools and there will be no spectators, but it can be viewed online as it will be streaming. There will also be an edited version uploaded afterwards, which will include additional events that may have been missed on the live stream.

Only teams and designated officials will be allowed access to the venue.

According to Denny, the Zones have had in the past anywhere from 600-900 people at the facility and they are hoping that with these modifications there will be fewer than 500 on any given day.

The extensive plan for the staging of the NAPSAC also encompasses there no longer being a quarter finals, due to the large numbers at the quarter finals and the top16 being advanced to the semi-finals.

There will not be an under-7 division as it has been omitted in an effort to cut down on numbers as well as with the management of the children in consideration – this age group was identified as being hard to keep physically distanced for the duration of the championships.

The open distance events have also been omitted, with only the medley relay and high jump staying.

According to Denny, the sanitising of the landing bed and bar after each jump is a labour intensive operation and thus had the potential to be long and thus it was decided to just hold one division.

The distance open events, had the potential for the jostling of position as they are not run entirely in lanes and thus to afford contact it was scrapped from the programme.

Each school can select two athletes for the different track events but only one for the field events.

There will be a virtual parade of teams, a pre checkin for athletes in the 10 am events, two separate call rooms.

With the track at the National Stadium deteriorating, the championships have been moved to the Usain Bolt complex and Alleyne said that their presentation to the Covid Monitoring Unit was given a go ahead for NAPSAC 2021.(CG)