?With the right sport pol­i­cy, To­ba­go can con­sis­tent­ly com­pete with larg­er coun­tries on the world stage. That's the view of An­nette Knott, Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Olympic Com­mit­tee. Knott was speak­ing dur­ing last week's stake­hold­er con­sul­ta­tion on the re­view of the To­ba­go Sport Pol­i­cy, which took place from Au­gust 27-28 at the Low­lands Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre, To­ba­go.

The con­sul­ta­tion, host­ed by the Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion, Youth Af­fairs and Sport, fea­tured sev­er­al key in­ter­est groups, in­clud­ing the Min­istry of Sport, sport­ing or­gan­i­sa­tions and per­son­nel across the is­land.Knott said To­ba­go has shown tremen­dous ath­let­ic po­ten­tial de­spite hav­ing a small pop­u­la­tion of 60,000.

The event atract­ed over five dozen par­tic­i­pants from a large cross-sec­tion of sport­ing dis­ci­plines from the sis­ter isle which in­clude - the Par­adise hock­ey Club, To­ba­go Ho­tel As­so­ci­a­tion, Soren Bish­op of SS­FL, FCB sports Foun­da­tion–Cather­ine Forde, Ainsly King of the YM­CA, Bran­don Gray–Lee­ward Golf As­so­ci­a­tion, To­ba­go Net­ball League–Ruth­lyn An­toine and Kieron Mc­Dou­gal of the To­ba­go Bas­ket­ball As­so­ci­a­tion.

Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor of the Di­vi­sion's De­part­ment of Sport Justin Lat­apy-George called for a col­lab­o­ra­tive ap­proach to take To­ba­go for­ward. "The con­sul­ta­tion speaks to where we want to go, to have crit­i­cal feed­back from the stake­hold­ers and to guide the process for­ward in­clu­sive of im­ple­men­ta­tion and pe­ri­od­ic eval­u­a­tion," Lat­apy-George stat­ed.

Ty­rone J Mar­cus, the at­toney for the Min­istry of Sport and fa­cil­i­ta­tor of the event ac­knowl­edged that the Sport pol­i­cy needs to deal with the To­ba­go-spe­cif­ic is­sues, to en­sure the de­sired de­vel­op­ment takes place.

As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary with di­rect re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for Sports, As­sem­bly­man Jo­mo Pitt dur­ing the con­sul­ta­tion voiced that the "ide­al path­way for To­ba­go ath­letes to per­form at the na­tion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el has to be pre­dictable and trans­par­ent. This leads to bet­ter ac­count­abil­i­ty of both the lo­cal and na­tion­al gov­ern­ing bod­ies."

The cur­rent draft of the pol­i­cy in­cludes four ar­eas; de­vel­op­ment, com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­i­pa­tion, fa­cil­i­ty man­age­ment and the link be­tween the To­ba­go Sport Pol­i­cy and the Na­tion­al Sport Pol­i­cy. Im­ple­men­ta­tion of the pol­i­cy is ex­pect­ed to be­gin next year.