By Audley Boyd, Assistant Editor - Sport

Yvonne Wilks, head of marketing, Digicel Jamaica.

USED to have problems accessing fixtures and results of the Manning and daCosta Cup football competitions?

Now you'll be able to give that difficulty a real kick by texting into a product to be launched for this season's competition by Digicel, the telecommunications provider which recently teamed up with Pepsi and schoolboy sports governors Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA), as major sponsors of this year's competition.

"We've a product that we call Digicel Live and Digicel Info. One is web based (Digi Live) and the other text based ... and it's information at your fingertips," Patria-Kaye Aarons, public relations executive at Digicel, explained while pointing to this new user-friendly service that is coming online for this year's championship.

She added: "One will give you a fixture and the other will tell you the scores."

Over 100 teams play in the very popular schoolboy football competitions islandwide and many games are played on a daily basis - simultaneously.

Both competitions are slated to kick-off tomorrow with a triple-header featuring two matches among schools from rural institutions and the other contest among the urban schools. But the new feature, discussed only Wednesday, will not be in place at start-up.

"It won't be ready for Saturday," Aarons said on Wednesday, "but we're sorting it out. We're actively putting it together right now, it's going to be ready for next week."

Portmore's Bridgeport High, last year's champions of the Manning Cup that is played amongst urban schools, will tackle Norman Manley in the first game, a Group D encounter set to kick off at noon.

The match will be followed by an opening ceremony that is slated to begin at 2 p.m., and exactly 20 minutes later Clarendon's Glenmuir High, last year's champions of the daCosta Cup are scheduled to kick off the second match against Kemps Hill, in a Zone I match.

Pride of place for the afternoon's feature will go to the Zone 'A' teams - Cornwall College and William Knibb - that is scheduled to start at 4 p.m.

Seventy-eight teams in 12 zones, will launch the preliminary challenge for the daCosta Cup, while 38 schools, spread almost evenly across six zones, will play for the Manning Cup.

The competition has a whopping $30.5 million sponsorship, which is at this time the biggest one-year deal for any football tournament in the country. The premier league, with new sponsorship this season, is expected to surpass that figure.

The package worked out for the schools competition involves a $50,000 subsidy for each participant, cash prizes, travelling and referees' fees and many other things.

While justifying their commitment to the competition, Digicel's head of marketing, Yvonne Wilks, in an earlier discussion about their growing involvement in sports here said "it's a nursery, a feeding ground for so many other things" such as the premier league, national teams, etc.

Tomorrow's matches

Noon: Bridgeport vs Norman Manley

2:20 p.m.: Glenmuir vs Kemps Hill

4 p.m.: Cornwall vs William Knibb