New­ly in­stalled Min­is­ter of Sport and Youth Af­fairs Dar­ryl Smith wast­ed no time in fa­mil­iaris­ing him­self with three sport­ing fa­cil­i­ties that are in the fi­nal stages of con­struc­tion dur­ing a tour last week.

Smith, along with per­ma­nent sec­re­tary Gillian Mac­in­tyre as well as staff from the Sports Com­pa­ny of T&T (Sportt), did a com­pre­hen­sive walk-through of the Aquat­ic Cen­tre and Cy­cling Velo­drome in Cou­va and the Ten­nis Cen­tre in Tacarigua.

Dur­ing the tour, the Min­is­ter iden­ti­fied his pri­or­i­ties re­gard­ing the fa­cil­i­ties, in­clud­ing the de­vel­op­ment of com­pre­hen­sive plans and poli­cies for the prop­er main­te­nance, man­age­ment and up­keep of the three fa­cil­i­ties. Smith not­ed that in the past, sev­er­al fa­cil­i­ties and build­ings were com­mis­sioned but soon need­ed sub­stan­tial re­fur­bish­ment due to in­ad­e­quate pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance man­age­ment.

An­oth­er el­e­ment Smith is keen on im­ple­ment­ing is a prop­er us­age pol­i­cy for na­tion­al and elite lev­el ath­letes. The fa­cil­i­ties were built for the na­tion's ath­letes to have a vi­able op­tion to train at home for in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion. The Min­is­ter felt that it was im­por­tant that all the nec­es­sary ath­let­ic ameni­ties were al­so read­i­ly avail­able to al­low lo­cal ath­letes a full cadre of sup­port ser­vices that would com­ple­ment their com­pet­i­tive ex­ploits. Among those sup­port ser­vices iden­ti­fied by the Min­is­ter while in dis­cus­sion with Sports­Com­pa­ny per­son­nel in­clud­ed, strength and con­di­tion­ing, sports psy­chol­o­gy, re­flex­ol­o­gy, mes­sage ther­a­py, per­for­mance test­ing, sports med­i­cine and in­jury pre­ven­tion.

Sup­ply­ing a ca­pac­i­ty build­ing for the Na­tion­al Sport­ing Or­gan­i­sa­tions with an em­pha­sis on in­creased lev­els of par­tic­i­pa­tion in their re­spec­tive sports, is al­so on his agen­da. Smith em­pha­sised the need for base­line da­ta (par­tic­i­pa­tion, de­mo­graph­ics, fre­quen­cy, ac­cess, etc) across all sports, which should lead to bet­ter de­ci­sion-mak­ing about in­vest­ments of state funds and the con­tin­ued sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment of each dis­ci­pline. He added that with the com­ple­tion of the fa­cil­i­ties, the sport­ing bod­ies must play their part in achiev­ing greater par­tic­i­pa­tion, ac­cred­i­ta­tion, vol­un­teerism and spec­ta­tor­ship for their sport.

The Min­is­ter has al­so com­mis­sioned a full re­view of all the rates and user poli­cies across all of the fa­cil­i­ties un­der the purview of the Min­istry and Sportt. While all of the fa­cil­i­ties have a role to play in pro­vid­ing for the needs of ath­letes at all lev­els, at­ten­tion must al­so be fo­cused on in­come gen­er­a­tion in or­der to en­sure the cit­i­zen sees an eco­nom­ic re­turn on the mil­lions in­vest­ed, and that the fa­cil­i­ties can achieve self-sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Al­so, all fa­cil­i­ties will be out­fit­ted with mod­ern, eco-friend­ly equip­ment and sys­tems. The fa­cil­i­ties' op­er­a­tional pro­ce­dures and poli­cies must al­so pri­ori­tise en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy and re­duc­ing their car­bon foot­print.

The three projects were con­cep­tu­alised in 2007 and were of­fi­cial­ly com­menced in 2009 when in­ter­na­tion­al project man­age­ment con­sult­ing firm Pix In­ter­na­tion­al Hold­ings was com­mis­sioned by the Sports Com­pa­ny to de­vel­op the terms and ref­er­ence, scope of work and ten­der­ing and eval­u­a­tion process. The con­tract was ten­dered in 2009 and fol­low­ing a full eval­u­a­tion of all the bids, the Shang­hai Con­struc­tion Group was iden­ti­fied as the pre­ferred con­trac­tor and was award­ed in 2011.

The fa­cil­i­ties are ex­pect­ed to be ful­ly op­er­a­tional ear­ly next year.