JORDAN FOOTE loses battle with cancer Holy Trinity’s 18-year-old football star.....As the aggressive cancer gained momentum, it claimed an invaluable prize when Foote’s left leg was amputated

BY SEAN A WILLIAMS Deputy sports editor Williamss@jamaicaobserver.com  Sunday, March 06, 2016   

A pall of gloom hovered over Holy Trinity High School and the wider Inter-Secondary schools’ Sports Association (ISSA) family yesterday with the heartbreaking news that one of their own had died, cut off in the tender flower of youth.

 Jordan Foote

Schoolteachers, students, members of the football fraternity, friends, and relatives of Jordan ‘Reddo’ Foote were plunged into mourning when the teenaged footballer lost his battle with cancer at the University Hospital of the West Indies in St Andrew yesterday morning.

Foote, 18, was diagnosed with the dreaded disease, which started in his left knee prior to the start of the schoolboy season last year, and consequently spread “to all parts of his body”.

As the aggressive cancer gained momentum, it claimed an invaluable prize when Foote’s left leg was amputated consequent to related complications in December of 2015, delivering a crushing end to a football career in bloom. In 2014, the lad from Dunkirk, a tough Kingston inner-city community, was on top of his game. His school team, Holy Trinity, enjoyed one of its most glorious seasons in schoolboy football.

In addition to being competitive in the Manning Cup and advancing to the knockout stages, the school — located at 18 George Headley Drive in Kingston next door to the iconic Sabina Park — also romped to the final of the then Lime Super Cup.

Holy Trinity eventually lost to Jamaica College.

The school’s success was largely attributed to the skill, leadership and heart of Jordan Foote.

But at the height of the school’s and Foote’s unprecedented success in football, mother fate delivered a mighty blow.

The crafty midfielder, who picked up an injury while playing in the pre-season STETHS Cup in St Elizabeth last year, later received the news no one wants to hear, when he was diagnosed with bone cancer.

But as Foote bravely fought to kick the parasitic disease from his body, he was not alone. He enjoyed unshakeable support from a circle of friends and family members, some of whom stayed with him to the very end.

One of them was his football coach, mentor and “father”, Devon Anderson.

“Words can’t express how I am feeling right now. I have not only lost a player or a student, I have lost a son. I was like the father he never had,” a deeply emotional Anderson told the Jamaica Observer yesterday. more