El Do­ra­do West Sec­ondary School fired five goals past Pleas­antville Sec­ondary School on Mon­day (No­vem­ber 2)in a com­fort­able 5-0 vic­to­ry in the Boys Cham­pi­onship Di­vi­sion Big Five Play-Off of the Sec­ondary Schools Foot­ball League at the Man­nie Ramjohn Sta­di­um in Mara­bel­la.

With the re­sult, they made a strong state­ment of their in­tent to be among the Pre­mier­ship Di­vi­sion ac­tion in 2027.

Af­ter years of play­ing on­ly in the low­er di­vi­sions of the SS­FL, the Dave Quam­i­na-coached school is on the cusp of his­to­ry. They have three more match­es to con­firm their en­try in­to the pre­mier­ship di­vi­sion, which Quam­i­na, who al­so coach­es La Hor­quet­ta Rangers in Tier 1 of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Pre­mier Foot­ball League, said he is con­fi­dent they can achieve.

The El Do­ra­do lads shook off ear­ly nerves to re­ceive max­i­mum points, cour­tesy of goals from Omari Ed­wards, Josi­ah Al­leyne, Ma­lik Joseph, Nashon Mo­ra, and Der­rel Daniel. Quam­i­na said his charges are the prod­uct of a two-year pro­gramme that was des­tined to get them at this very junc­ture in the league and even ex­ceed it with pre­mier­ship qual­i­fi­ca­tion.

“Two years ago, we said that this is the stage we want­ed to be at now. And we’re at that stage now, where we’re see­ing the fruits of our labour. We have a cer­tain play­ing style that we’ve been work­ing on for two years, and the boys know ex­act­ly what they have to go and do, so they know the play­ing style and every­thing,” Quam­i­na ex­plained.

Quam­i­na not­ed fur­ther, “Ba­si­cal­ly, we just im­ple­ment­ed the sys­tem and told the guys what we want­ed and worked on how to ex­e­cute it. It’s a won­der­ful bunch of youths.”

The El Do­ra­do lads will next face host East Mu­cu­rapo to­mor­row in their sec­ond match of the play-offs be­fore fac­ing Rox­bor­ough Sec­ondary in game three next Wednes­day at a venue to be de­cid­ed. Mean­while, Mon­day’s sec­ond Big Five en­counter be­tween East Mu­cu­rapo and Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege of Ch­agua­nas at East Mu­cu­rapo did not take place due to the un­avail­abil­i­ty of of­fi­cials.