While not viewed as one of the traditional sports on the island, Jamaica Volleyball Association (JAVA) President Jacqueline Cowan believes greater investment in the sport could significantly enhance the lives of their youth.

Over the last 13 months, Jamaica has received a boost due to their regional success. In July 2023, the country’s women created history by winning their first-ever regional senior title when they claimed the Caribbean Zonal Volleyball Association (CAZOVA) Championship in Suriname. Jamaica also hosted the CAZOVA under-19 championships at the GC Foster College this summer, marking the return of regional volleyball to the island for the first time since 2019. The nine-team tournament saw Jamaica’s girls winning the overall title, while the boys finished in the top four. In addition, a 19-team delegation including 16 athletes are currently in China for a training programme.

Though pleased with the achievements over the period, Cowan told the Jamaica Observer that JAVA is hoping that more companies will come on board due to the financial struggles they’ve faced over the years.

“We do get support from our regional body, which helps a lot, without that support it would be difficult but on an ongoing basis, most of the money that is used in training and in support of the programme is really done through the association itself and our allocation from the Sports Development Foundation,” Cowan said.

“The challenge is that we compete with football, track and field, netball and horse racing so we do have a challenge there. We’re hoping that with the success of the junior team and last year with our senior women’s team becoming Caribbean champions, that we’ll be able to sell our product and show that we can compete and compete well.”

However, the struggles won’t be an easy fix as seen with the JAVA club league, which hasn’t flourished as it would like due to a lack of facilities.

“We have four clubs that have access to a venue and it is difficult for the clubs who don’t have. Even when we’re trying to schedule, we have confines in terms of how we can use the venue. GC Foster and UWI are venues and they’re not just used for volleyball so we have to be splitting times with other sports, so many times we have to postpone matches because it is being used by someone else,” Cowan stated.

“For our product to be attractive, we can’t be switching our schedule on a whim and sometimes we’ve done so with no notice because the notice we would have been given would have been short, so we know that attracting sponsors and media to attend our events, we need to be structured in a way that we’re not postponing matches. We as an association will have to be looking closer at our calendar in terms of how we schedule our games and that is one of the biggest challenges,” she added.

Despite the issues, Cowan says the association will be putting greater emphasis on youth development, which involves strengthening their partnership with high school sports governing body, ISSA.

“At this point in time, our main aim is to see how best we can have our athletes transition into colleges. That’s where most players are recruited, so you’re not going to find many persons going from high school to professional, so we have to look at how we get persons to transition. It might mean that we have to have scouts coming down here, just like they do in other sports like football,” she said.

“We also need to really upgrade our high school programme. We work with ISSA and they have a chairperson in charge of volleyball, so we’ll be meeting and finding out how we can better collaborate in improving the level of high school competition. To do that, we need more internationally-certified coaches and we did that in 2022 during COVID because we can’t look at one part of the equation; we need to look at the athletes, the coaches and officiating. That really is the plan — to have a holistic approach to the programme.”

Cowan is urging the private sector to support the volleyball programme as their investment will be worthwhile.

“We’re looking at youth, so we’re having an under-17 tournament next year and we’d love some support for that. It takes a lot to host but let’s look at transitioning our grassroots from primary schools into high schools, hoping they can matriculate into college so we can be on the regional stage,” she said.

“We just want to be able to do more holistically, we’re recognized regionally, and we’d love to see that recognition locally to know that there is a sport other than the traditional ones that has the ability to represent on the world stage.”