Cayman’s emerging track stars bid for CARIFTA glory

The Cayman Islands will send 15 of its top junior track and field athletes to Trinidad and Tobago to contest the 2025 CARIFTA Athletics Championships over Easter weekend.

Competing in eight disciplines over the three-day meet – taking place 19-21 April at Port of Spain’s Hasely Crawford Stadium – will test Cayman’s up-and-coming talent against some of the Caribbean’s most promising stars.

“It’s a solid team, with all individuals being potential medallists in their respective disciplines,” said Cayman Athletics team manager Scimone Chin.

Together with co-manager Paula Dawkins, team coach Kenrick Williams and massage therapist Dwayne Williams, Chin will accompany the athletics team on its chartered flight to Trinidad on Thursday, with a 34-strong squad of Cayman’s best age group swimmers jetting off alongside them to compete at the 2025 CARIFTA Aquatics Championships the same weekend.

In total, there are four athletes taking part in individual track events, two of whom – 100-metre runner Jeleah Maize and DaQuana Howell, who is entered in the under-17 girls’ 200m race – are also slated to take part in the 4×100-metre relay. That’s a new event for the Cayman team, who last year had too small a squad to form relays in any age group.

Aaliyannah Anderson, a sophomore at Lincoln University who is among several Caymanian athletes competing at the collegiate level in the United States, will be competing in the 100m hurdles.

But notably absent from this year’s roster are two-time reigning 100m champion – and last year’s 200m bronze medallist – Davonte Howell, and 100m silver medallist Jaiden Reid.

The pair, who turn 20 this year and, as such, are too old to compete at CARIFTA , now train at the University of Tennessee and Louisiana State University, respectively. Howell also competed for Cayman at the 2024 Olympics since his last CARIFTA appearance.

Cayman’s third and final medallist from CARIFTA 2024, shot putter Brianna Smith, is another who has aged out of the competition.

However, this year’s squad does welcome back Anthony Chin Jr., who achieved a fourth-place finish in the long jump event in Grenada last year, and Delora Johnson, who finished eighth in the U17 girls’ high jump and seventh in the long jump, and will contest the long jump again this time around.

Anderson, Johnson, Chin and Jakob Ebanks, who is entered in the U20 boys’ 200m sprint, are the only CARIFTA veterans in a squad that is larger than last year’s, but otherwise made up of debutants at this level.

Among the newcomers are Gabriella Linton (shot put), Kaliah Haye (discus), Giavanna Henry (high jump), Dwight Hewitt Jr. (high jump) and Shevon Campbell (high jump).

The Cayman Islands’ 2025 CARIFTA Athletics Championships team: