Lo­cal track and field head Ephraim Ser­rette is hop­ing the chang­ing of the age group­ings at the Carif­ta Games will re­sult in an im­proved per­for­mance at next year's ju­nior event set for Mar­tinique.

The lo­cal con­tin­gent won 20 medals (eight gold, two sil­ver and ten bronze) at last week­end's Games in Nas­sau Ba­hamas, the low­est in some ten years.

At the Carif­ta con­gress dur­ing the Games, a de­ci­sion was made to change the age cat­e­gories to Un­der-18 and Un­der-20 in keep­ing to IAAF age group­ings.

"That may make a lit­tle dif­fer­ence es­pe­cial­ly for the field ath­letes who would have been mov­ing from the Un­der-17 to Un­der-20 and would have the change in weight in the shot put, dis­cus and javelin and even the hur­dles with the heights.

"I think when the change is made, we may see a lit­tle dif­fer­ence in the per­for­mance of our ath­letes. Even ath­letes who move from the Un­der-15 to Un­der-17 take at least a year (to ad­just) to the new age group, un­less you have an ex­cep­tion­al per­former."

The NAAA pres­i­dent said with the new rules or­gan­is­ers will have to ad­just their com­pe­ti­tion pro­grammes.

"The first thing I would want to do is to meet with pro­mot­ers to dis­cuss the change. It may not hap­pen this year. Our ju­nior cham­pi­onships al­ready re­flect the new age groups. If we can sit and come to­geth­er quick­ly with the na­tion­al pro­gramme we may be able to keep some of the core ath­letes and see if we could source com­pe­ti­tions in the re­gion for them."

Ser­rette point­ed out the 20 medal maul was good giv­en that the size of the team was re­duced to 44.

"When we look at the spread of the medals across the var­i­ous cat­e­gories of events: five medals in the sprints (three in the re­lays and two in­di­vid­ual), four in the throws, four hur­dles medals, four in the mid­dle and long dis­tance and three in the jumps to give up a to­tal of 20. There was an even spread."

The for­mer na­tion­al sprint­er added that more needs to done in the track events to get bet­ter per­for­mances.

"We need to do more work na­tion­al­ly es­pe­cial­ly in the track area. We are see­ing the ben­e­fits of the field and jumps pro­gramme. I think we need to con­vince more coach­es to bring more of the track ath­letes in­to a na­tion­al track pro­gramme."

"We have quite a few lev­el five coach­es and chief coach­es who we can get to sit down and work out a na­tion­al pro­gramme for our na­tion­al ath­letes."

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