"The chance of suc­cess in­creas­es when you put coun­try be­fore self."

This was the mes­sage re­layed by Sports Min­is­ter Anil Roberts, who re­vert­ed to his part-time job as coach when he spoke to mem­bers of T&T's Un­der-17 men's wa­ter po­lo team which will de­part for Buenos Aires, Ar­genti­na next Fri­day, to con­test the Pan Amer­i­can Ju­nior Wa­ter Po­lo Cham­pi­onship.

The Cham­pi­onships, a qual­i­fy­ing event for next year's FI­NA World Youth Wa­ter Po­lo Cham­pi­onship, will run from Au­gust 23 to Sep­tem­ber 1, where a top five spot will suf­fice in the team's pro­gres­sion to the glob­al com­pe­ti­tion.

The na­tion­al ju­nior wa­ter po­lo team, along with par­ents, ex­ec­u­tive mem­bers of the Am­a­teur Swim­ming As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (ASATT) and of­fi­cials of the Sport Com­pa­ny of T&T (Sportt), were present at the VIP Lounge of the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um, Wright­son Road, on Tues­day night, where the charges were of­fered words of wis­dom from Roberts, who al­so serves as coach of Olympic medal­ist George Bovell III.

Chair­man of Sportt, Se­bastien Padding­ton, who rep­re­sent­ed T&T in freestyle swim­ming at the Olympic Games in 2000 al­so spoke to the ju­nior ath­letes.

Roberts' ad­vice to the par­ents was straight­for­ward: "Al­low the coach to do his job."

Say­ing he was al­ready in­spired by their past suc­cess and the de­ter­mi­na­tion etched in their faces, Roberts ad­vised the ath­letes to use their coun­try as mo­ti­va­tion to suc­ceed, cit­ing re­cent FI­NA World Cham­pi­onship medal­ist Bovell as an in­spi­ra­tion and a pa­tri­ot.

T&T's par­tic­i­pa­tion at the last Ju­nior Pan Amer­i­can Cham­pi­onship in 2011 re­sult­ed in a fourth placed fin­ish, which se­cured the team a spot at last year's World Cham­pi­onship, where it placed 18th.

The team's cur­rent head coach Al­lan Too A Foo said his team is as like­ly as any oth­er to fin­ish in the top five at the com­pe­ti­tion. He coached the team to its first ever gold medal at the Cen­tral Amer­i­can and Caribbean Swim­ming Con­fed­er­a­tion (CC­CAN) Cham­pi­onships in San Jose, Cos­ta Ri­ca, where the team tri­umphed 8-4 over Puer­to Ri­co in the fi­nal.

T&T can­not field a girls' team at the Pan Amer­i­can Games due to the team's with­draw­al be­fore the re­cent CC­CAN qual­i­fy­ing event.

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