Nigel Si­mon

The T&T Vol­ley­ball Fed­er­a­tion will play host to an eight na­tion Caribbean Vol­ley­ball As­so­ci­a­tion Beach Vol­ley Tour­na­ment which will serve as a qual­i­fi­er to the Lon­don 2012 Olympic Games. The qual­i­fy­ing tour­na­ment sched­uled for the Saith Park, Ch­agua­nas, Fa­cil­i­ty from De­cem­ber 16 un­til De­cem­ber 20 will fea­ture 32 teams in all, four each (two men and two women) from each coun­try. They in­clude teams from hosts T&T, US Vir­gin Is­lands, Ba­hamas, Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos, Suri­name, Aru­ba and Cu­ra­cao. From the tour­na­ment, the top four men and women teams will ad­vance to the sec­ond round, Con­ti­nen­tal qual­i­fi­er.

On Thurs­day, the pres­i­dent of the T&TVF, Mush­taque Mo­hammed will of­fi­cial­ly open the event at the Cen­tral Re­gion­al In­door Sports Are­na, Ch­agua­nas from 6 pm. Mean­while the T&TVF will stage a one-day qual­i­fy­ing tour­na­ment to pick the na­tion­al teams for the qual­i­fiers at Ch­agua­nas to­mor­row from 9 am. Head­ing the list of com­pet­ing teams are Cen­tral Amer­i­can and Caribbean Games par­tic­i­pants, Daneil Williams and Fa­bi­en Whit­field who com­pet­ed on the Norce­ca cir­cuit for most of the sea­son. The oth­er pairs list­ed to com­pete in­cludes, Sean Mor­ri­son/Nolan Tash and Chris­t­ian Fran­cois/Kevin Rivers in the men and Kel­ly-Anne Billingy/Ayan­na Dyette and Pauline Woodroffe/El­ki Phillip in the women's cat­e­go­ry.

Mor­ri­son gets Lev­el II cer­tifi­cate

Na­tion­al se­nior men's vol­ley­ball team mem­ber, Sean Mor­ri­son re­turned home from San­to Domin­go, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic ear­li­er this week where he was one of 32 coach­es who suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed their FIVB Lev­el II coach­ing cer­tifi­cate at the FIVB De­vel­op­ment Cen­tre. Mor­ri­son, was the lone coach from T&T to par­tic­i­pate in the two-week course which be­gan on No­vem­ber 24. Oth­er par­tic­i­pants came from from An­guil­la, Brazil, Cana­da, Cos­ta Ri­ca, Cu­ba, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Dutch St Maarten, El Sal­vador, Grena­da, Guatemala, Haiti, Hon­duras, Ja­maica, Mex­i­co, Nicaragua, Pe­ru, Puer­to Ri­co, St Vin­cent, USA and US Vir­gin Is­lands. The course was con­duct­ed by the Cuban FIVB in­struc­tor Gilber­to Her­rera with the as­sis­tance of Ale­jan­dro Ar­cona­da of Ar­genti­na and Jorge Perez Ven­to, al­so of Cu­ba. The main ob­jec­tives of the FIVB coach­es course are to im­prove the knowl­edge and com­pe­tence of coach­es and teach­ers, to present re­cent trends in the sport and to ex­change ideas and ex­pe­ri­ence.