Coach Chung-Fah Invests in Youth 

Coach Chung with football great, of Jamaican
parentage, John Barnes

Winston (back left) with mother and other members
of the family.

Winston Chung-Fah (right)

Coach Chung (circled) at Bisham Abbey in England in
1978 at a month-long course for coaches

Wednesday,  August 10, 2005

In 1989, a call from the then President of the Cayman Islands Football Association (CIFA), Alan Moore, brought Winston “Coach” Chung-Fah to the Cayman Islands.

Mr Moore didn’t know Mr Chung-Fah at the time but he had heard of his work with underprivileged and wayward children in Jamaica and needed his help.

Mr Moore told Coach Chung of things he saw in the Cayman Islands which he described as “danger signs” in relation to children. Drugs, said Mr Moore were “creeping into Cayman and negatively affecting the Islands’ children.”

“Mr Moore wanted to have a hand in warding these dangers away,” explained Coach Chung.

The underprivileged life, and the battle to get out of it, is one that Coach Chung knew only too well.

As a child he rested his head on makeshift beds in the ghettos of inner city Kingston, Jamaica. However, as an adult, he has stood, and continues to stand, on football fields all over the world with football royalty from Brazilian star Pele to the Jamaican-British football legend, Johnny Barnes.

Coach Chung is Jamaican – with a Chinese father, a man who came from the Hakka heartlands in the Guangdon Province of mainland, China. Coach was also – as he describes in his soon-to-be published autobiographical work – “the first son of a proud black Jamaican woman, born in the bowels of mid-island Jamaica and framed in the cubicles of a Kingston ghetto. (I am) the fusion of two peoples, the meeting of East and West….,” he said.

“I ended up in Kingston at age eight only because I was on my way off the island. In keeping with Chinese tradition, the first-born had to be sent away to the homeland to learn the culture, and I was on my way there. However, for many reasons I never made it.

“The life I led after that had my father saying I wouldn’t live to see my sixteenth birthday. I played football with the YMCA because football clubs at that time rejected us because we were not the sons of gentry. By 1964, at 24 years of age, I was pressed to form the Santos Football Club and the rest is history.”

By 1989, Coach Chung had already blazed his name across the famous creation and growth of the famous Jamaican Football Club – Santos United – an enclave that produced many of Jamaica’s famous athletes and performers in other fields. Chung-Fah’s name rang solidly through halls of national and international fame when he did the unimaginable. He took Clarendon College – a countryside school – on a runaway victory with the national football cup, a feat that left the elite Jamaican colleges in shock for many years.

Coach Chung explained that when he decided to come to Cayman “my thinking was not only to have these youngsters play football. My focus was education. I wanted to tell them that based on the varied circumstances in life, all men were not born equal, but the fact is that God gives all men one thing equally, and that is time. And what they did with their time was the important issue.

Coach Chung explained that he came to Cayman and worked with youngsters for one year. “In that year we got more than 30 boys off to college overseas,” he recalled. “However, at the end of that year we were not able to acquire the necessary funding to continue the programme. Phones and lights were cut off and so I had to go.

“I left Cayman and went to the United States. Between 1990 and 1994 I developed the Miami Classic, which was another sport and youth-oriented programme that met with great success. At one point the great Pele, who by that time, I had already met on a previous occasion, visited me and gave his endorsement to that programme.

“Soon after, in early 1995, Lennie Hew – a Jamaican who came to Cayman in 1958 – and I, met at a cricket match in Jamaica. There and then he asked if I would return to continue the work I had begun. Since that time, I returned, and started The Academy,” he explained.

The Academy is an after-school programme where children go to do homework and get involved in sports as well.

“We had teachers to assist the children with their weakest subjects,” added Coach Chung. “We had one aim that was to have at least one child going off on scholarship every year. Through the years the programme has continued against some difficult odds. It has been a battle to stay alive. I must say that the work of The Academy could not have been accomplished without the input of Avlyn Tatum.

“She worked at keeping funding coming in, and, even with her ties in corporate Cayman, it was still difficult,’ he said.

Coach Chung explained there were hard times and not everyone offered support with supermarkets turning them down when they asked for sandwiches to feed the children.

“But we also had some stalwarts on board like the Utility companies,” said Coach Chung.

“KFC, Burger King, and people like John Michael Foster who donated a second-hand car. We have proven ourselves, though. At one stage we began getting the Ivy League Schools to come to Cayman to scout for talented youth. In addition, we got overseas clubs to visit the Island to play against us. Last year alone we had ten boys going off on 99 per cent scholarships.

“In 2003, when we were again going through another threatening financial slump, Dr. Frank McField, then Minister of Sport, heard that I would have to leave because of the programme’s problems. If the Government had not come forward when it did, there would be no programme today.”

At the time of this interview with Cayman Net News, Coach Chung was in the United Kingdom, travelling with young Caymanian scholarship awardees.

Asked what were the things that influenced him to make the most of his life, Coach Chung said, “In my late teens and early twenties the black power movement was awakening. We were also hearing more about men like Sam Sharpe and Claude McKay and these men, and their thinking, greatly influenced my ability to be self-motivated.”

urgery and became an insulin-dependent diabetic. However, he still maintains a pace that is the envy of some who are far younger. Driven by dreams for young people, one of Coach’s mottos is, “Some men see things as they are and ask ‘why,’ while some men dream things that never were and ask ‘why not.’

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