An increase in the number of substitutions and players per team are among the changes that have been made for the 2016 staging of the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) Flow Manning and daCosta Cup football competitions.

This season, each team will comprise 22 players — four more than the customary 18 — and will be allowed five substitutions per match, up from three. Another new component to this year’s competitions will be the introduction of water breaks being permitted midway both halves of games.

George Forbes, ISSA’s competitions director, explained that the changes were introduced to facilitate “mass participation”, which is aligned with the competitions mandate of youth development.

“For you to be training and playing some of these kids from June, July into December, we are saying that, as a coach, you want to have a boy play 20 matches for 90 minutes. Why not let him play and if you are leading take him off and put on somebody else and give them a chance,” said Forbes, while addressing members of the media at a press launch at Terra Nova All-Suite Hotel yesterday.

“Our thing is mass participation [and development]; it is not about the 15 and 20-love, because that is very difficult to sell to sponsors. So if we can have the boys participating that is all we want, mass participation in the sport,” he stressed.

Forbes added that ISSA will be firm on the issue of underprepared fields this season, which could result in a number of schools finding alternate venues to host their home games.

“We have warned some of the schools, and we are going to be doing an inspection starting next week. We are not going to be killing you for a lot of grass, but basic amenities like field being down in a ditch and all of these things,” he declared.

Manning Cup champions Jamaica College will kick off the season against St Andrew Technical High School (STATHS) on September 10 at 2:45 pm at Catherine Hall Sports Complex in St James, while defending daCosta Cup champions St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) will open against Black River High at 5:05 pm, followed by Anchovy versus Cornwall College at 7:00 pm in the usual triple-header at the venue.

Eighty-eight schools will participate in the rural area daCosta Cup across 15 zones, with the top two teams and the two best third-placed teams advancing to the Inter-zone round of 32.

In addition to the eight group winners, the runners-up will also advance into four groups of four with the winners qualifying for the semi-finals.

Forty teams, two more than last year, spanning across seven groups, will contest the Manning Cup. Two groups will have five teams each, while the other five groups will have six teams each.

The Manning Cup final is set for Saturday, November 26 at the National Stadium, while the daCosta Cup final will be held one week later on December 3 at the Catherine Hall Sports Complex. The one-leg Olivier Shield final will be contested on December 10 at a rural venue.

The incentives this year will see the winning teams of both competitions receiving no less than $500,000 in prize money.

With this year marking the fourth in Flow’s $150 million five-year deal, Carlo Redwood, vice-president of marketing and TV, expressed his delight with the outcome of the partnership thus far.

“It has been fantastic; we continue to work closely with ISSA to bring back the glory days to schoolboy football; we have always talked about that. It is about the excitement and high-quality execution of a football competition, and we continue to work to improve that,” said Redwood.

Meanwhile, Dr Walton Small, president of ISSA, lauded the sponsors, particularly the title sponsors, for their tremendous thrust to schoolboy football.

“This company has shown keen interest in not just only providing financial support, but also partnering with us in developing the schoolboy football product into an attraction for our stakeholders and patrons.

“We must commend Flow for sharing our vision of making schoolboy football a premium competition, not just locally, but also regionally,” the Wolmer’s Boys’ School principal said.