WATCHING Keith Wellington as he strides across the campus here in boiling Santa Cruz, one cannot help but see a striking resemblance to Clement Radcliffe. Not a physical one, of course.

Radcliffe, with a deep chocolate hue, is built more like a sprinter. Wellington, not quite ‘St Elizabeth brown’, but close, is more suited for a few laps around the track or a place on the basketball team. The likeness that both men share is their cult-like support for sports at their respective school.

Not since Radcliffe, a former ISSA president, left the Glenmuir High in 2009 has there been another headmaster whose job description is not prejudiced to academics. “And not prejudiced against it, either,” said Wellington.

In fact, at times, it would appear as if both men are actually sportsmasters and not principals. Such is their public support for student-athletes that should they fail to show for an event involving their schools — be it a pre-season daCosta Cup friendly or the final day of Champs — it is likely to be because they are unwell.

Like Radcliffe, you can see Wellington on the team bench, in the stands mixing with the supporters or just buzzing about the venue trying to tie up loose ends before kick-off. And the way he celebrates at the final whistle, you would assume he was born, raised and schooled at 90 Main Street, Santa Cruz.

“You know, it all started in school,” explains Wellington, the St Elizabeth Technical High School principal. “At Munro College, like all Munro boys, I tried every sport. I played cricket, but I also tried track and field and football, so I’m always heavily involved in sports. I was a fairly good academic student, but I always felt it was important to be involved in other activities.

“As a matter of fact, the recommendation I got at the end of college was that I could have done much better academically had I stayed away from some of the co-curricular activities I was involved in. And I think I actually graduated with second highest grade point average in college, but everybody knew I wasn’t a book-slave,” he said.

“As a teacher, I always felt that one of my responsibilities is to ensure that students get the opportunity, in whatever sphere of school life, to expose their abilities because I don’t think we have enough space in society for all academics.

“Now, as a principal, I think that I am a businessman, so my main aim is to produce ‘products’ that are marketable. And if you look at what is happening out there, what is going to set them apart is not how much they know, but how much they can contribute outside of that prescribed area.”

Listening to Wellington for just a few minutes, it becomes clearer that what is happening at STETHS — the rich success they are reaping in sports, not just football and cricket, in track and field and netball too — is by no means coincidental. He speaks almost without pause about a project that is clearly dear to him, with the light in his eyes almost as bright as the smile that graces his face for most of this interview.

“One of the things that you find with sports is that it gives people a sense of pride, a sense of belief,” he said. “That is why, for example, you get so much support from the past students when you do well in sports; they are now able to associate themselves with success. You will do well in academics but still don’t get that support because it is not something that you hear on the streets every day. But do well in football, for instance, and you will find past students who will come and offer you 30 computers, which may not have been offered before because they weren’t associating themselves with you.”

He continues: “If you look at it, when corporate entities are looking to do an advertisement campaign, the people who they turn to are almost always from the entertainment industry — sports personalities or entertainers. So, in this sense, I view sports as an opportunity to provide us with a marketing campaign, so to speak, because when you do well a lot people want to be associated with you — whether it’s your past students, the business community or even parents out there who want their children to come here,” argued Wellington.

“In fact, I have parents now who come to me all the way from Hanover and Trelawny with their children who did the GSAT and had STETHS as their first, second or third choice simply on the basis that they hear so much good things about us. When they hear that we are not a boarding school, sometimes it creates a problem. Most of them will still ask ‘where can I board my child?’ because the child is adamant that is STETHS they want to come. So, for us, sports is more than just a game that we compete in to win.”

Being this resolute in their support of co-curricular activities — in a country where sport, despite of our global success, is still seen as the ugly stepsister of the bookworm maiden — means people like Wellington and Radcliffe would have taken quite a bit of stick over the years.

Many argue, wrongly or rightly, that they exalt physical prowess ahead of brainpower. But with Radcliffe no longer in the game, it is Wellington and STETHS, plus the emerging force Manchester High, who are now susceptible to the condemnation.

Wellington, though, seems unfazed by this.

Leaning back in his black, leather chair — encircled by a glut of trophies, plaques and photographs of successful past students on his office wall — Wellington outlines in detail the reasons for STETHS’ success in the past six years, which he declares is not limited to sports.

“I have been principal since 2008 and it is acknowledged that we have done exceptionally well over that period in sports. However, what a lot of persons don’t know — and I have deliberately tried not to highlight it because I think that is my core function — is that we have also done well academically,” reveals Wellington.

“If you look at our academic performance over that same period — and I’m not taking sole credit for that either because we work as a team, and I was also a part of the previous principal’s team so the foundation would have been set for a while now.

“But if you just stick to the same period that we compare the sports results with, you would see that our academic performance has improved leaps and bounds. We are now averaging 80-odd per cent overall in CXCs, and every single one of our students is allowed to do CXCs. On average, students are passing six, five CXC subjects. So you can clearly see that the academics have been keeping pace with the sports or the sports has been keeping pace with the academics.”

But how does he respond to the criticisms?

There is the notion that STETHS is successful mainly because it recruits athletes heavily. There is also allegation that the school is favoured by ISSA, which grants them too many home fixtures for football games that are supposed to be played at neutral venues — and this seems to be the one that annoys Wellington the most.

“Sometimes I laugh to myself,” he responds, after a sharp intake of breath. “At other times I am a bit pensive but most of the times I just think it is out of ignorance.”

“When people talk about us recruiting, I will admit, we do give the coaches the opportunity to recruit. But they will tell you that I am one of the hardest people to get through because we have a very straightforward policy.

“We will accept students at grade seven from the GSAT, so I will say to them: ‘I have X number of spaces and I will allocate this to you, this to you and this to you’. If I give them two spaces and they find four persons, they not getting the additional spaces. They not getting any space in grade eight, grade nine, none in grade 10 and none in grade 11, so they have to build from the bottom up. Because the next time they have that opportunity is for sixth form, and the students must qualify academically for sixth form,” Wellington explained.

“If you look at our programmes, football and cricket in particular, you will realise that most of the youngsters start to play for the senior team from age 15, 16. So when you play a STETHS cricket team, for example, all the senior players would be playing for four, five years. And we are trying to do that with football as well. So when we are criticised about the recruiting, I just laugh,” he went on.

But he is not laughing now. For the first time in the conversation, Wellington is aggravated, dismissing as ignorant those who fuel the idea that STETHS have won seven major schoolboy football trophies in the last six years mainly because they play a number of crucial fixtures at home.

“When people talk home advantage, it’s neither here nor there,” he argues. “Every year is the same thing, but they are not thinking that it will be a disadvantage for us to play away in football. We have the best facility, but you are going to ask us to play on substandard facility and it is not our fault that there is not enough quality facilities around.

“And the same persons who criticise us don’t realise that Dinthill plays their games at Dinthill. They don’t recognise that Frome play their games at Frome, Marcus Garvey play all their games at Drax Hall, Cornwall at Jarrett Park. These are home venues for all of these teams. But no one talks about it. We have been playing most of our games here for years but we didn’t start winning until 2009 so it wasn’t an issue until then.”

Wellington is composed again, this time praising the dedication of his coaches and the teachers, who, he says, educate the athletes to use their talent as a bridge, not necessarily the final destination.

“If you look at us, especially in football, we don’t have a lot of national youth players, because we don’t emphasise trying to play for Jamaica as there is not much to be gained from that. What we say to them is: ‘Listen, try and do your best so that you can win because at the end of the day people only recognise winners. Try and make sure that when people recognise you have something to offer them outside of football. Your schoolwork is going to be the one to take you across that bump. If you do that, then the opportunity is going to be there to continue playing football, if you want to. But getting an education is going to provide you with a livelihood for the next 50 years’.”

For the most part, interviewing Keith Wellington is trouble-free. He is a composed, eloquent speaker, who obviously has intimate knowledge of the subject. The tallest hurdle is getting him to talk in detail about his personal contribution to the STETHS revolution. Or his many administrative duties which fall outside of his day-to-day portfolio. Each time he is asked to speak on a personal accomplishment, it takes him just a few seconds to revert to the teamwork rhetoric, which seems to be a character trait and not necessarily a PR tactic. When he finally launches into a self-absorbed monologue, Wellington says his “heavy involvement” in sports does not allow him enough time to take on additional responsibilities, which already include a vice-president role at ISSA and a seat on the National Sports Council.

“Sports take up a lot of my time,” he says, “and I have a four-year-old son who is already complaining that I spend too much time on my phone and the tablet.”

But ask if he — like Radcliffe did for over a decade — will eventually mount a challenge for the presidency of ISSA, Wellington appears non-committal: “I am not very political because I always speak my mind. I can’t be a hypocrite, and you know with politics you have to say what the people want to hear. If I am asked to run, if people think that I am good enough, I am always willing. I don’t shy away from leadership; I will offer my services in whatever sphere I am deemed to be capable. But in terms of actively perusing a particular route to leadership, I am not like that,” Wellington ended