Malvern, St Elizabeth — In December 2017, six football players left the agrarian surroundings of Munro College in St Elizabeth for Kingston College in the densely populated urban setting in downtown Kingston.

Fast-forward to October 2018 and Kingston College — led in large parts by the scoring prowess of Oneeko Allen, one of the players who ‘transferred’ from Munro College — won their first eight games without conceding a goal, and are among the favorites to win the ISSA/Digicel Manning Cup, breaking a drought that has lasted for over 30 years.

Back in Malvern, Munro College are struggling badly and are in danger of not getting past the first round of the Inter-Secondary School Sports Association (ISSA/Wata daCosta Cup as at the time this article was written, the former champions were fourth in Zone E on nine points from eight games.

With the amendments to the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) transfer rules that were announced last week, this mass move from St Elizabeth to Kingston could be the last such as ISSA, which runs high school sport, seeks to ‘level the playing field’ and allow smaller schools to keep the players in whom they have invested.

The amendments to the rules call for a cap on the number of students transferred to schools for the sake of sports, as well as barring any student from playing sports if they transfer twice.

On the face of the new rules, which reports say were unanimously accepted by those who attended the watershed meeting in Kingston last week, they could be the most far-reaching in the history of high schools sports in Jamaica.

Keith Wellington, vice-president of ISSA and principal of St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS), said last week, ISSA members have been calling for changes that would limit the seemingly free movement of talented athletes from school to school, primarily to a handful of Kingston-based institutions.

Mass transfers are nothing new, dating back to the 1960s, with several schools across the country amassing “super teams”.