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Kumar must do more than offer challenges

Feb 16, 2011 Sports

By Rawle Welch
As I stood on the floor at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall listening to the various sponsors representatives and important stakeholders address members of the media during the launching of the Scotia Bank / DDL (Pepsi) / GSDF Schools Football Academy, I could not help but ponder on remarks made by Director of Sport Neil Kumar.
The Director speaking at the occasion challenged the Organisers and the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) to take the Programme to a level where it caters for wider participation from schools outside Georgetown and even highlighted his displeasure at President’s College not being among the schools selected to partake in the inaugural event.
The fact of the matter is that this current initiative is a Pilot Project as was revealed by Scotia Bank’s representative Jennifer Cipriani-Nelson and endorsed by GSDF’s Colin Baker, whose idea it was to implement such a programme, and with the Ministry of Sport and the National Sports Commission financial input missing, in addition to a paucity of support from the Business Sector, to accept Kumar’s challenge at this time would simply result in the failure of a well intended initiative.
I’ve had the privilege of attending numerous launchings, press briefings and other assignments over the years and I can say without fear of contradiction that similar expressions have been made, but to date no tangible evidence have surfaced to indicate that those expressions of support have borne fruit.
As I’ve lamented over and over in previous articles, until Government see Sport as business and understand that in order for Guyana to attain positive results on the regional and international levels, massive investment has to be made, then and only then should we take the Director’s remarks serious.
There is no point in stressing about Government’s projected massive investment in Sport when year after year, apart from a few disciplines that rightly do not rely on Government’s assistance, our returns do not reflect real investment.
The current programme not only needs facility and personnel support from the Government Agencies, but financial support as well and perhaps if that was forthcoming then the Project would have accommodated more schools even those out of Georgetown as the Director advocated for.
The observation of lack of financial support for teams, training of teams, overseas engagements have persisted for years and administrators have complained for years about the lack, so isn’t it time all stakeholders sit and try to address the anomaly.
Guyana cannot continue to treat sports as some insignificant activity because even if you’re to look closer to home, all of our regional neighbours have a completely different view.
Sport is now providing another avenue to alleviate poverty and other social ills that occur in society, so for us to reduce the pervasiveness of such negative actions the decision to invest substantially in its promotion will have to be made.
Hopefully, after this initial project is successfully, the next Government will see it fit not to make the mistakes of the past and provide more significant financial support for sport.

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