The University of the West Indies is in the midst of a renaissance of sport. Many of the Caribbean’s top sports people attend one of its campuses, where they train and compete to hone their abilities for competition at all levels. The UWI itself has teams in sports like cricket and football. At St Augustine, the campus hosts sporting events, including The UWI International Half-Marathon, one of the top races of its kind in the Caribbean.
If there’s one initiative that best signifies how important sport is to the university, it is the establishment of the Faculty of Sport.
“On 1 August 2017, The UWI established the Faculty of Sport, its newest faculty in over 40 years,” says Dr Akshai Mansingh, Dean of the faculty, “to underscore the new thinking at the institution about the importance of sport and sport studies in the 21st century.”
That quote is taken from the first chapter in a recently published book titled Sport Matters: View from The UWI Faculty of Sport. Sport Matters, a collection of columns written by staff and affiliates of the faculty, is edited by Emeritus Professor of Literatures in English, Funso Aiyejina, Head of The UWI St Augustine Academy of Sport. The column is carried in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian.
“It was a labour of love,” says Professor Aiyejina, who is best known as a poet, writer, academic and contributor to the literary life of the region.
The Faculty of Sport is unique in The UWI system as it is the only multi-campus faculty. Based at The UWI Regional Headquarters in Jamaica, it is represented on all campuses through Academies of Sport, which function like departments in a faculty. It’s a new structure, for a new faculty, to make a new foray into an area that has the potential to not only nurture generations of athletes that can compete on the world stage, but also unlock new economic opportunities.
In his introduction to the anthology, Professor Aiyejina quotes UWI Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, who states that sport is “one industry that we can develop right now to diversify our economies and make our economies competitive”.
From its founding, there has been a deep interest in sport at The UWI. Sport was seen as a component for developing a more complete graduate who could take on the role of developing the region. In a message written in the Pelican Annual 1966, UWI’s Guild of Students publication, cricket legend and Dean of Students Sir Frank Worrell states that the University Games Committee had ten “recognised West Indian sports”.
However, he lamented that, “the university has not quite succeeded in bringing out the wealth of [sporting] talent that abounds on campus,” and concludes, “One can advance a thousand and one theories on this disappointing state of affairs. The most reasonable, I think, is that the West Indian student has not been able to strike the mean between his mental and physical exertions.”
Now, it’s a new day for sport at The UWI. The Faculty of Sport offers a host of programmes at the certificate, undergraduate and graduate level. These include, among many others, Sport Coaching, Sport Medicine, the UWI/FIFA/CIES Diploma in Sports Management, and the MPhil/PhD in Sport. Initiatives like the Sport Matters column (and now book) are very important in creating the environment for the new professionals that the university is producing.
“For sport to thrive,” says Professor Aiyejina, “there must be effective communication within and between its ecosystems of athletes, coaches, administrators, medical teams, facilitators, supporters, and the like.”
The anthology covers columns that ran from August 2019 to December 2020, and look at themes like sport policy, injuries and their prevention, drug use, racism in sport, keeping fit, and of course the overall development of the sector. COVID-19, its impact and strategies for mitigating its risk, is the subject of several of the articles.
Professor Aiyejina says the book is the product of many people beyond the writers and editor. These include the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, Dean Mansingh, the wider Faculty of Sport team, and The UWI Press.
Sport Matters is a quick and informative read, surprisingly entertaining (even for people who may not be particularly interested in sports). It also serves, in a way, as a record of a movement towards a new paradigm in education, and potentially, industry. A half a century from now, writers and historians may look back, the same way we can look back today at the writings of Sir Frank, at the emergence of our Caribbean sporting renaissance.
On July 31, Professor Aiyejina left the post of Head of the St Augustine Academy of Sport. He was its first head, taking up the position in 2018. At the end of his first year at the helm, The UWI Vice-Chancellor’s report to the University Council for 2018/2019 said Aiyejina’s institutional knowledge “has assisted immensely in shaping the structure of that academy”.
Professor Aiyejina was a senior administrator at UWI St Augustine for many years until his retirement in 2014 as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education. With no background in sport, he approached his role at the St Augustine Academy of Sport as an organisational leader.
“I am just a sport enthusiast,” says Professor Aiyejina. “I cannot qualify for the last 11 in my family of four! Luckily, my job as the Head of the Academy of Sport was, in the main, to administer the Academy on a day-to-day basis, walk the programmes (designed by subject matter specialists) through campus and university approval processes, coordinate academic and outreach activities, represent the Faculty of Sport on campus committees, and design an administrative structure to take the academy forward.”
Though the inherent challenges of establishing a brand new academy for a new faculty was compounded by the destablising effects of the pandemic, he is extremely positive about the experience:
“The experience has been wonderful. The staff at the academy, from cleaners through grounds men to administrative and technical assistants, are very dedicated and they work well under pressure, as was demonstrated when we part-hosted the CPL T20 Tournament in 2020. They reaffirmed my core belief that once you treat people as people, they will treat you as a person in return.”
Now that the foundation has been secured, what are Professor Aiyejina’s hopes for the Faculty of Sport and sport in general for the region?
“The Faculty of Sport has staff and affiliates who are committed to teaching, research and outreach for the development of the Caribbean,” he says. “The leadership of the Faculty is progressive, passionate, and humane. The Faculty’s policy of cross-campus teaching affirms the need to, no matter their home campus, give our graduates a global UWI experience. The quantum of articles on Sport and COVID-19 in Sport Matters underscores the interventionist, public intellectualist ideology of the Faculty and a clear rejection of an ivory tower mentality.”
