After a four-year hiatus forced by the global COVID-19 pandemic, one of the Caribbean’s most anticipated inter-campus collegiate sporting competitions is making a triumphant return this month, and the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) has entered the 2024 iteration ready to compete for the top podium spot.
A 150-strong delegation of student-athletes from the Cave Hill Campus departed Barbados last week for the 2024 UWI Games, which will be hosted across 10 days from May 21 to 29, primarily on the grounds of UWI’s St Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago. This year’s tournament marks the first time the games have been held since 2019, after repeated pandemic-related postponements left the beloved competition on pause for years.
More than 575 competitors are set to take part in this year’s event, drawn from all five of UWI’s regional campuses. For the first time in the tournament’s history, the Five Islands Campus will field a team, joining long-standing participants Cave Hill, Mona, St Augustine, and UWI Global.
Across the 10-day competition, athletes will compete for medals in 96 events spanning 11 popular sporting disciplines: track and field, swimming, basketball, netball, volleyball, lawn tennis, table tennis, football, cricket, and hockey. Competition gets underway early on Saturday morning, with the first wave of Cave Hill Campus athletes already in position to compete in opening day matches.
Speaking ahead of the team’s departure from Grantley Adams International Airport on Thursday night, Barbados’ Minister of Sport Charles Griffith expressed confidence in the Cave Hill squad’s ability to deliver strong results. Griffith noted that the team appeared visibly excited for the opportunity to compete, and drew a parallel to Barbados’ recently successful CARIFTA Games delegation, predicting Cave Hill would finish atop the overall standings. “The coaches are all in place and they have been prepared very well, so I can only expect the very best from Cave Hill,” Griffith said.
Reached by Barbados TODAY after arriving in Trinidad, Cave Hill team manager Aundrea Wharton outlined the squad’s opening day schedule, confirming that table tennis kicks off the action at 8 a.m., followed by opening fixtures in netball, football, hockey, and cricket on the first day of competition.
Wharton explained that the Cave Hill delegation enters the tournament with a clear goal: to improve on their second-place overall finish at the 2019 UWI Games, the last edition held before the pandemic shutdown. He framed the 2024 games as a new beginning for the entire UWI collegiate sporting community, aligned with this year’s official theme: “Reunited, Reignited, Ready.”
Nearly all of Cave Hill’s 150 athletes will be competing in the UWI Games for the first time, Wharton said. Many of the young competitors were still completing primary school when the tournament was last held in 2019, meaning the event will bring a notable cultural shift and new experience for the first-time participants. Even with this new cohort, Wharton said he remains optimistic about the team’s chances of taking the overall title, pointing to a roster stacked with elite junior and senior national-level players across multiple key disciplines.
“Naturally we have a very strong cricketing core and our female volleyball unit is very strong as well. This also the case with our male hockey unit which is again, very strong. We are looking to get key performances, especially out of those units,” Wharton said. He added that Cave Hill’s netball squad also features a large contingent of junior and senior national team players, leaving the campus well-represented across every competitive discipline in the tournament.