In 10 years new foot­ball club Re­al West Fort Unit­ed will be one of the top clubs in the Caribbean Foot­ball Union (CFU) as well as in the Con­fed­er­a­tion of North, Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, for­mer na­tion­al strik­er and coach Ron La For­rest has said.

La For­est who is known pop­u­lar­ly as 'the Pro­fes­sor' by the clubs he has coached lo­cal­ly, un­veiled his club 'Re­al West Fort' to the pub­lic at a press launch on Tues­day at the Diego Mar­tin Sports Com­plex, a club made up on­ly of play­ers from west Trinidad, such as Mar­aval, Diego Mar­tin, Pe­tit Val­ley, Point Cumana, Care­nage, L'Anse Mi­tan and Co­corite, among oth­er ar­eas.

The club will con­test the sec­ond tier of the As­cen­sion In­vi­ta­tion­al Foot­ball League which is sched­uled to kick-off at the end of the month (Ju­ly). La For­rest said his in­ter­est al­so is to tack­le the top flight T&T Pro League or what­ev­er the coun­try's top league will be called, with a spe­cial fo­cus on de­vel­op­ing and mar­ket­ing lo­cal tal­ent.

De­spite the launch, the club is still in the process of ty­ing up loose ends such as be­ing legal­ly reg­is­tered, open­ing its bank ac­count, draft­ing of its con­sti­tu­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to La For­rest, they have al­ready iden­ti­fied two po­ten­tial spon­sors for his team who they are cur­rent­ly in talks with, and he wants more cor­po­rate cit­i­zens to sup­port their ges­ture of de­vel­op­ment of the youth and hav­ing a com­pet­i­tive team from west Trinidad in the coun­try's top-flight leagues.

With lit­tle or no big-name play­ers in their camp, La For­rest said he will con­tin­ue what he has been dop­ing for many years, which is to de­vel­op a team to pre­vail in any tour­na­ment he en­ters. The team be­gan prepa­ra­tion soon af­ter Tues­day's launch with more than 20 play­ers un­der La For­rest's watch.

La For­rest said he is aware of the en­vi­ron­ment his team will be com­pet­ing in, one that re­quires fund­ing and ex­pe­ri­ence on the field. But while these ar­eas are be­ing worked on. Ac­cord­ing to La For­rest: "The club's ma­jor strength is the ex­pe­ri­ence, pas­sion and fo­cus of the Board of Di­rec­tors to set up a foot­ball club that is sus­tain­able, com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven and based that cre­ates last­ing so­cial change to use foot­ball as the ve­hi­cle."

"The re­gion the team rep­re­sents is a strong PNM area, our rep­re­sen­ta­tive is the for­mer Min­is­ter of Sports, the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance and the Prime Min­is­ter. The sta­di­um ear­marked to be our home ground - the Diego Mar­tin Sport­ing Com­plex is the largest sin­gle in­vest­ment in sport made by this PNM gov­ern­ment so we ex­pect a buy­ing in on the vi­sion of our club by the po­lit­i­cal pow­ers that be. The re­gions we rep­re­sent are hotbeds of gang ac­tiv­i­ties and crime, but the team is viewed as a ve­hi­cle to cre­ate change and break bor­der­lines."

"Many of the re­gions rep­re­sent­ed are low-in­come ar­eas but are mix with ar­eas of great wealth. The club will tru­ly be un­stop­pable if the af­flu­ent ones sup­port it. In our re­gion, al­though a lot of peo­ple gen­er­al­ly have ac­cess to tech­nol­o­gy, a high num­ber still de­pend on tra­di­tion­al means to get in­for­ma­tion and ac­cess ser­vices," La For­rest said.