As one of the Caribbean’s most enduring community-focused alumni sports tournaments prepares to mark its 15th year of operation, event leaders have unveiled ambitious plans to grow beyond its football roots by adding multiple new sports to the annual competition lineup, all while building on a legacy of giving back that has already pumped more than $500,000 into local participating secondary schools.
Cranston Kirton, chair of the Braggin’ Rights organising committee, shared details of the expansion roadmap in an interview ahead of the 2025 edition of the tournament, confirming that organisers are working to reintroduce past sports offerings and add new disciplines over the next five years to support more school communities across Barbados.
“We launched with just football back when we started, and later branched out to add netball, but we’ve had to pause the netball competition for the last several years while the island’s main netball facility undergoes major renovation work,” Kirton explained. “Now that we’re gearing up for our 15th anniversary, we’re ready to rebuild our multi-sport offering: we’re targeting a netball return to the official tournament calendar by 2027, and we plan to run that discipline for at least two consecutive years before adding our next new sport, which will almost certainly be cricket, with hockey to follow after that.” Kirton added that sports fans can expect to see at least one additional competitive sport added to the Braggin’ Rights lineup as early as 2026.
The expansion announcement comes just weeks ahead of the 2025 Braggin’ Rights tournament, which will officially get underway on August 9 with Soccerama, a kickoff event paired with a community Health and Wellness Fair at Empire Playing Field in Bank Hall. This year’s Soccerama round will feature 14 competing teams, headlined by defending open division champions St George Lions, who enter the tournament as heavy favorites to retain their title after a full off-season of organized training and exhibition matches.
The tournament’s age-divided structure will also see the Over-35 division defending champions, St Leonard’s Upper Fifth, chase an unprecedented fourth consecutive title, while last year’s Over-47 division winners Coleridge and Parry will face new competition from two first-time entrants: St Lucy Secondary and Harrison College. Overall, the 2025 tournament will host 21 squads in the Over-35 division and 10 teams in the Over-47 age group.
After 15 years of community-focused operations, Kirton acknowledged that the all-volunteer organising committee has faced no shortage of logistical and financial hurdles along the way, but remains committed to growing the event’s charitable impact. As a charity-driven tournament, 100% of all prize funds are distributed directly to participating schools through alumni associations, giving winning squads a structured way to invest in their former institutions.
To date, long-standing partnerships with local corporate sponsors have allowed the committee to distribute more than $500,000 in total prize funding to participating schools, benefiting everything from campus infrastructure projects to student scholarship programs and extracurricular activity budgets. Kirton noted that the committee is actively seeking new corporate partners and sponsors to expand the tournament’s reach, with the long-term goal of providing meaningful financial support to every school represented by an alumni team in the competition.
“This tournament has always been about more than just sport – it’s about former students coming together to lift up the schools that shaped them,” Kirton said. “Every new partner we bring on board helps us get closer to that goal of supporting every single school in our tournament.”