Tag Archives: SSFL

The Secondary Schools Football League (SSFL) executive committee today announced the postponement of Boys Championship Division matches in the North, East, Central and Tobago Zones, barely 24 hours before kickoff on Tuesday 13 September. The decision will impact 24 schools across Trinidad and Tobago who were preparing to make their …

Phew!  The Secondary Schools Football League (SSFL) is back folks.  After a three-year hiatus, which surely felt like an eternity to some, the popular secondary schools competition resumed at the Ato Boldon Stadium in Couva last Friday, as Presentation College (San Fernando) edged fierce rivals Naparima College to the Tiger …

The Secondary Schools Football League (SSFL) will feature a raft of changes for its 2022 season—the first since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic—as new president Merere Gonzales and his board respond to a late sponsorship deal, experiment with a new format and address the impact of departing sponsors. First, …

Gateway Athletics director Adrian Romain confirmed today that the grand winners of the Republic Cup Youth Football Tournament will walk away with TT$3,000 each. The competition, which will be run in a seven-a-side format, has five categories: Boys 17-19, Girls 17-19, Boys Under-16, Girls Under-16 and Boys Under-14. The overall …

St Benedict’s College midfielder Josiah Ochoa is the Secondary Schools Football League’s first trophy-holder in close to three years, after the 15-year-old form three student won the SSFL Online Ball Juggling Competition earlier this month. Ochoa emerged best of a field of 10 participants to cop the award. Nine entrants …

Secondary Schools Football League (SSFL) president Merere Gonzales has suggested that vaccine hesitancy among Trinidad and Tobago’s student population could be a key factor in the Government’s decision to block schools football for the second successive season. Gonzales said the SSFL executive had been in communication with the ministries of …

It was in primary school that we were introduced to Charles Wolfe’s ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’. Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note/As his corpse to the rampart we hurried./Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot/O’er the grave where our hero we buried. Those lines came …

Leave the egos at the door and instead bring bags and bags of patience. Fixing our football will require much more time than it took to drive it down to its current position. For too long, we have attempted to hold conversations in which each leader tried to look like …

So far I have only touched on youth development from a ball manipulation and decision-making viewpoint. However, playing in competitive games non-stop can also hinder the physical development and health of players.  Again, the local adage that ‘the more you play, the better you get’ is misleading on this count. …

Youth development in Trinidad, simply put, consists of tournaments and competitions. The Secondary Schools Football League (SSFL), Youth Pro League (YPL), Republic Bank Youth League, Next Level U-19 Tournament and Commissioner’s Cup are the main players in this arena.  I will use the SSFL as the starting point of the …

A question on The Burdie and Barney podcast during our discussion with former England Premier League and 2006 World Cup goalkeeper Shaka Hislop lingered long after that episode was over:  Have we been developing players? Or were we just blessed with talented players previously and, now, not so much?  At …

Former 1998 Fifa World Cup assistant referee Merere Louis Gonzales, a retired teacher at Success RC and Mt Hope Secondary and a lay minister at the Maloney, D’Abadie and Mausica RC churches, is the new Secondary Schools Football League (SSFL) president, following a resounding win in the SSFL’s virtual annual …