MONTEGO BAY, St James — The joy of winning the ISSA/FLOW daCosta Cup title for the first time in 15 years overflowed at the special devotion held at Cornwall College yesterday as the 120-year-old school celebrated a 12th lien.

Members of the team that beat last year’s champions St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) 2-1 in the final at the Montego Bay Sports Complex on Saturday before a massive crowd to end the season with 18 straight daCosta Cup wins, were toasted by the school body, members of staff, the school board, old boys and parents.

Vendors, hawking flags in the school’s red and gold colours, badges with pictures of the players, and plastic horns were early on the scene, and by the look of things made good business.

“What a gift,” Patrick Reid, chairman of the school’s board, said in his short speech. “We are reclaiming Montego Bay as our own.”

The school’s principal, Dr Lennox Rowe, told the cheering students: “It’s a great day to be part of the Cornwall College body. You have done your best and we are proud of you.”

A large contingent of students and teachers from Mt Alvernia High, the all-girls Catholic school next door, also joined in the celebration that could be heard from several hundred metres away.

Stacey-Ann Reynolds, the principal at Mt Alvernia, said the schools have worked “very well together and we are across the road from each other, and principal to principal this was my gesture of working with the school across the road”.

Reynolds, who took over earlier this year, explained: “I am from Kingston. I am coming from a football school (St George’s College) and a system where schools extend to each other…we were here and we heard the noise and decided to join the celebrations. I had no second-guessing to send them across, as long as they were safe.”

Heroy Clarke, president of the Cornwall College Old Boys-Montego Bay Chapter and Member of Parliament for Central St James, pledged the support of the past students to the team and to the school. “The hard work has paid off and going forward we must practise what we did this year and maintain the discipline.”

Dr Dean Weatherly, who was celebrating his birthday, told the Jamaica Observer he was not surprised that the team went unbeaten in the daCosta Cup.

“We did not exceed our expectations. I knew from the beginning and told everybody this is the year we are going to bring the glory back to Cornwall and this is the start of something new,” said the coach who led Cornwall to his ninth title on Saturday.

Dr Weatherly, who explained that as coaches, they set the bar a little higher than normal, “to put pressure on ourselves…going undefeated was one of our goals, the first thing was trying to keep clean sheets, but that went against Green Pond (in the third game of the season) and since that was out of the way, we set a goal of being undefeated all season”.

Cornwall College won all 18 games in the daCosta Cup, losing in the FLOW Super Cup final after three wins and also in the semi-finals of the Ben Francis knockout.

Dr Weatherly lauded the support system at Cornwall College, which he said stepped up to the plate admirably. “It was very refreshing to see the holistic approach this year; we had a team psychologist, proper nutrition and living together on campus this year was the right move and this augurs well as, in our analysis of what went wrong over the years, we saw where we came up short.”

It is not perfect yet, he hastened to add. “There are things we can tweak here and there so we can maintain what is happening, but this is a good foundation and from here we can only look ahead.”

After a 15-year break in-between titles, he is not willing to wait that long again. “This is not a one win and done programme, we can’t wait another 10 or 15 years for another daCosta Cup, we have to make it an annual thing, not just compete but achieve and look to making it to finals. We need to make it a dynasty and recapture the Cornwall College spirit of the previous years, winning Olivier Shield as well.”

Winning the daCosta Cup, he said, was the main aim. “We have no regrets about how the season has gone, the Flow Cup and the Ben Francis are brawta, the daCosta Cup is the real deal and come next year we must make the necessary adjustments we had this year with the number of games we had in a short period of time.”

Dr Rowe said the daCosta Cup win and the outpouring from the community yesterday was what they hoped for. “Our thrust is to unite the school family and to get back that Cornwall College pride and, as you can imagine, this event has helped to firm up what we are trying to accomplish here.”

Even before the final, Dr Rowe said the old boys and other well-wishers had stepped up. “Even leading up to the final, a lot of the old boys were coming together to support the school, and it will even get better now and the students have shown a certain pride and this will trickle down to the other areas of the school.”