Regional Headquarters, Jamaica, Wednesday, January 30, 2019—Holder, Chase, Dowrich, Roach, Hetmyer. West Indian cricket supporters will remember those names for their historic Test win against England this January in Barbados. The University of the West Indies is doubly proud to join the international community in celebrating this victory.
In that resounding defeat, records were set and new names were etched into our West Indian annals. We are very happy that among those names are Captain Jason Holder, who scored a stoic double century. His not-out partnership of 295 with Shane Dowrich (116), led to that 381-run victory. It also passed the previous unbeaten partnership of 259 set by the great Indian batsmen, VVS Laxman and MS Dhoni in 2010. Holder’s 202 was the third highest by a batsman at No. 8 in Test history, coming behind Pakistanis Wasim Akram (257 n.o.) and Imtiaz Ahmed (209).
Along with teammates, Shannon Gabriel and Test debutant John Campbell, they have all come out of the Sagicor UWI WICB High Performance Centre at The UWI Cave Hill Campus. The Centre was later relaunched in 2017 as the Sagicor-UWI Cricket High Performance Centre under The UWI’s Faculty of Sport and now includes the first sports science labs in the region, with modern facilities, qualified coaches and video analysis technology that give players access to the kind of training support that produces truly high performances.
Naturally, we are thrilled that six of the players from the current Test team have been members of the Sagicor UWI WICB HPC, but we also want to pay tribute to the bowlers, Roston Chase, who took eight wickets for 60 runs and Kemar Roach, who took five wickets for 17 runs, as well as to salute the promising batsman, Shimron Hetmyer for his two delightful innings. As a former student at The UWI, Captain Holder has played for the Combined Campuses and Colleges (CCC) team, now known as the Marooners, who are the current champions of the annual Regional 50-over tournament.
It has been 12 years that the CCC has been playing first-class cricket and the success of many members of its team is one of the reasons that The UWI is assured that supporting our young athletes is a key element of developing West Indian society. Indeed, from 1963, when The UWI hired Sir Frank
The Faculty of Sport has been working with Cricket West Indies to offer accredited coaching qualifications. This year, the plan is to introduce pitch preparation and turf maintenance certificate courses.
The Faculty has a broader mandate to develop not just cricket, but to contribute meaningfully to the development of a sport industry in the region.
Since its launch in 2017, it has spread itself in the form of four academies: Cave Hill Academy of Sport, Open Campus Academy of Sport, Mona Academy of Sport and St Augustine Academy of Sport. Each one is involved in various professional and academic programmes.
For more information, visit www.uwi.edu/sport.
About The UWI
For the past 70 years The University of the West Indies (The UWI) has provided service and leadership to the Caribbean region and wider world. The UWI has evolved from a university college of London in Jamaica with 33 medical students in 1948 to an internationally respected, regional university with near 50,000 students and four campuses: Mona in Jamaica, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, Cave Hill in Barbados, and an Open Campus. As part of its robust globalization agenda, The UWI has established partnering centres with universities in North America, Asia, and Africa such as the State University of New York (SUNY)-UWI Center for Leadership and Sustainable Development, the UWI-China Institute of Information Technology, the University of Lagos (UNILAG)-UWI Institute of African and Diaspora Studies and the Institute for Global African Affairs with the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The UWI offers over 800 certificate, diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Food & Agriculture, Engineering, Humanities & Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Science & Technology, Social Sciences and Sport.
As the region’s premier research academy, The UWI’s foremost objective is driving the growth and development of the regional economy. Times Higher Education has ranked The UWI among the top 1,258 universities in world for 2019, and the top 40 best universities in its Latin America Rankings for 2018, and was the only Caribbean-based university to make the prestigious lists. For more, visit www.uwi.edu.
(Please note that the proper name of the university is The University of the West Indies, inclusive of the “The”, hence The UWI.)
