How football lost the battle for Ephraim Serrette

The current president of the National Amateur Athletic Association is Ephraim Serrette, a former world-ranked athlete who is now giving his all back to the sport of track and field, both as an administrator as well as by way of doing his part in a lucrative government job.

Track and field has been his entire life. It has given him everything he holds dear to his heart, including upward social mobility.

The amazing thing, though, is that Ephraim Serrette was actually a pretty good footballer, who loved nothing more than scoring goals and then basking in the glory as he watched the little girls in his primary school scream and giggle at his Herculean skills with a football. Well, time longer than twine. Back when he was a child, at the San Juan Government secondary school, circa 1973, one of his favourite teachers was the unforgettable Mrs. Merlyn Reid-Edwards. Her ambition was to seek out and create track and field superstars from young boys and girls who, quite obviously, already had the natural talent necessary to rise to the top. And she was boldfaced to boot.

In fact, she couldn’t care less about how much talent Ephraim had as a footballer. One day she happened, quite by accident, to see Ephraim running in the schoolyard. His method was so polished, fluent and effortless; and Reid-Edwards decided, right there and then, that this was the boy whom she would mould into the next Emmanuel McDonald Bailey. If Ephraim wanted to be a Diego Maradona, that was his hard luck, because she had already made up his mind for him. Immediately, she gave strict orders to the school’s Physical Education teacher that Ephraim Serrette was to be banned from any further participation in football.

She was fearful that his football ambitions might “contaminate” her plans for the future, which were to make him into a human silver bullet, at the age of 14 years old. The eagle-eyed Mrs Reid-Edwards was about to construct one of the most gifted 100 metres specialists that Trinidad and Tobago would ever see. All she had to do now was to get Ephraim Serrette to stop thinking about a ball, and concentrate instead on a pair of running spikes and white finish line. Many people believe that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but in the mind of Reid-Edwards, the easiest way to harness a boy’s discipline and loyalty was to provide him with free transport. She had a blue Hunter motor car, and every day as soon as school finished, she would wait guardedly by the school gate to pick up Ephraim and whisk him away, straight to the Aranguez Savannah, where he would spend hours upon hours hard at track and field training, supervised by Reid-Edwards, who had long lured his parents into the scheme. Soon afterwards, his became the first school to enter the National Junior Track and Field Championships as a school team, which was quite unusual back in those days, considering that everybody else entered as a club team.

From a fancy footballer in 1973, Ephraim found himself on an aeroplane two years later as part of a Trinidad and Tobago track and field team headed for Nassau in the Bahamas, to compete in the Junior Carifta Games (back then, the acronym Carifta stood for the Caribbean Free Trade Area). His areas of specialty had by then expanded to include the 4x100 metres relays, and even though he didn’t win a medal, he had become so comfortable with running by then, that he now made up his own mind, and said goodbye to football forever. Ephraim Serrette is a father of two who is now exactly 50 years old, but for some unknown reason all that running has blessed him with the fountain of youth. During the day, this university graduate and human resource specialist is now a “big boy” at the Sports Company of Trinidad and Tobago, an organisation set up by the government of Trinidad and Tobago, in my opinion, apparently to help the roughly 40 national sporting associations scattered throughout the length and breadth of this country, to better manage their affairs. He is best remembered as the “youthman” who once held the national junior record for the 100 metres – a time of 10.26 seconds – for almost a quarter of a century; nearly 25 years!

As a junior athlete in 1976, he cast caution to the wind and decided to compete against seniors as well. He impressed the coaches and selectors to some extent, and Ephraim prayed night and day that they would feel sorry for him and at least give him a chance to prove his worth at the l976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada. At the time, he was only 19, and they were looking for four good men for the sprint relay team. The selectors eventually turned up their noses at his name, but Ephraim continued training nonetheless… never giving up.

In his pet event, the 100 metres sprint, he became the first junior athlete to be crowned both National Junior champion as well as the National Senior Champion in 1977. Back in the 1970s, the government handed out only two athletics scholarships per year. Eventually, Ephraim was a recipient, and he headed off to university in the United States of America. Over the years, he would get selected on a number of national senior teams, regardless to whatever his age was. His annus mirabilis was at the Central American and Caribbean [CAC] Games in a city called Medellin in Colombia, where he emerged as part of the historic gold-medal winning 4x100 metres relay team. He was always the anchor, meaning the person running the fourth and final leg of the race, and the winning quartet was Hasely Crawford, Aldwyn Noel, Anthony Husbands and Ephraim Serrette.

In that same year, 1977, he went to the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Canada, where he and the relay team picked up a silver medal. Subsequently, he returned to the land of his birth, where he voluntarily served as an advisor for athletics. In 2006, NAAA president Ken Doldron resigned abruptly, two years into his next term, and Ephraim Serrette was installed as the new president. However, each team lasts for three years, following which new election must be held as a rule. It means that at this current time, Serrette is a caretaker president. Later this year, he will have to offer himself up for elections and, if the votes are in his favour, he will have a full term until 2010.