"Re­vert to Zon­al foot­ball and leave out the Co­ca Co­la In­ter­col play-off for this year's Sec­ondary Schools Foot­ball League (SS­FL), if there is to be a short­ened ver­sion this year," coach­es from four out of the five zones have said.

Their com­ments come two days af­ter SS­FL pres­i­dent William Wal­lace, in a Guardian re­port on Thurs­day, said the League could be cur­tailed by chal­lenges caused by the COVID-19 sit­u­a­tion. The ex­ec­u­tive of the schools league will meet soon to de­ter­mine if they will have to run a short­ened ver­sion or not.

They will al­so have to de­cide on whether to have com­pe­ti­tion on­ly for the Pre­mier­ship and Cham­pi­onship Di­vi­sions and leave out ac­tion in the low­er di­vi­sions such as the Un­der-16, 14, Girls U-15 and Form One U-13.

Coach­es Shawn Coop­er of Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege, Ronald Daniel of St An­tho­ny's Col­lege, Ker­ry Lynch of Spey­side High School and An­tho­ny Samuel of Mal­ick Sec­ondary al­so be­lieve, there should be no pro­mo­tion or de­mo­tion this year if the league is short­ened.

Coop­er told Guardian Me­dia Sports his main con­cern will be on play­ers in their fi­nal year, who will be at­tempt­ing to get schol­ar­ships abroad, oth­er­wise, he em­braces the idea of a short­ened sea­son.

Coop­er, who guid­ed the south­ern­ers to their first-ever In­ter­Col ti­tle last year, said play­ers like Jaiye Shep­pard, who scored the win­ner for 'Pres' in the In­ter­Col fi­nal against Na­pari­ma Col­lege, will be look­ing for schol­ar­ships to go out.

"There are lots of play­ers who would have been look­ing for­ward to this sea­son to see if they can get out to North Amer­i­ca. Sports­max will al­so be a very in­te­gral part in this, in terms of mar­ket­ing the play­ers and get­ting them to be seen by coach­es," he said.

"It will be a bur­den on some of the play­ers if you have to ask some­one to video­tape a game if Sports­max is not there. Coach­es nor­mal­ly want to see a whole game and not a video you put to­geth­er with just your good points."

Coop­er's boys are set to be­gin train­ing soon in an at­tempt to suc­cess­ful­ly de­fend their ti­tle.

Daniel said, "If we have to run foot­ball this year, they will have to go back to the zones, just as how it was be­fore. And from there, de­pend­ing on what­ev­er time we have, we can play a Big Five. This means they will have to leave out all the low­er di­vi­sions, it is al­ready tight."

Mean­while, Lynch be­lieves the Pre­mier­ship Di­vi­sion can be di­vid­ed in­to two groups that will play one round of com­pe­ti­tion, and the top teams will go in­to a play-off. With this for­mat, Lynch said the SS­FL ex­ec­u­tive may still be able to play the In­ter­Col which is nor­mal­ly a short tour­na­ment any­way.

Oth­er­wise, Lynch said it might be use­ful if we can re­vert to the zon­al com­pe­ti­tions which will end prob­a­bly in a big five play-off.

Mal­ick coach Samuel said if there is to be a short­ened sea­son, then there should be more match-days every week.

"We can prob­a­bly play al­most every day in the week at re­duced game-times, so in­stead of hav­ing 90-minute games, we can have 60 min­utes in­stead. There must al­so be no pro­mo­tion or de­mo­tion and this should ap­ply for both the Pre­mier­ship and Cham­pi­onship Di­vi­sions. We can leave out the In­ter­Col tour­na­ment," Samuel said.

Apart from a pos­si­ble short­ened ver­sion of the SS­FL this year, Wal­lace and com­pa­ny are al­so brac­ing for cuts in grants for schools from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, cuts in fund­ing from their spon­sors, dras­ti­cal­ly re­duced crowd sup­port at match­es and un­cer­tain­ty about the role of Sports­max.