As Noel Gar­cia stood on the ter­race of the Bri­an Lara Crick­et Acad­e­my (BLCA) last Fri­day, sur­round­ed by a car­ni­val of West In­di­an fans who turned up for the first T20I against In­dia, he was over­whelmed with a sense of pride and ac­com­plish­ment. This was the first in­ter­na­tion­al match played at the venue.

But, in the midst of the cel­e­bra­to­ry at­mos­phere that en­gulfed the oc­ca­sion, the chair­man of the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T (Ude­cott) can re­trace every bounc­er this venue faced since be­ing com­mis­sioned in 2004.

Five years af­ter its of­fi­cial open­ing by then min­is­ter of sport, Dar­ryl Smith, there are ad­ver­tise­ments across the press mar­ket­ing the fa­cil­i­ty as a lo­ca­tion for con­fer­ences, wed­dings, con­certs and oth­er large-scale gath­er­ings. As Gar­cia watched West In­dies and In­dia cre­ate his­to­ry at the venue last week, he would have known the BLCA has to be­come an all-rounder to sur­vive as op­posed to wait­ing on re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et at spo­radic times through­out the year.

To put it in­to con­text, rou­tine main­te­nance at the venue costs an av­er­age of $100,000 every month. This in­cludes 24-hour se­cu­ri­ty, plumb­ing and gen­er­al main­te­nance.

Rough­ly every two months, the roofs need to be pres­sure washed. One does not have to look far to see the con­se­quences and rapid de­te­ri­o­ra­tion of a lack of main­te­nance; the Man­nie Ramjohn Sta­di­um in Mara­bel­la, Ato Boldon Sta­di­um in Cou­va, Lar­ry Gomes Sta­di­um in Mal­abar and Jean Pierre Com­plex in Port of Spain are a few ex­am­ples.

It is why Ude­cott has been left with lit­tle choice but to cre­ate a busi­ness mod­el that helps the BLCA se­cure its own in­come to off­set its costs.

Gar­cia ex­plained the ad­ver­tise­ment, “What we are po­si­tion­ing BLCA for is a fa­cil­i­ty that hosts events oth­er than crick­et.” Over the last few weeks, he con­firmed there were two wed­ding cer­e­monies held at the venue. A wed­ding cer­e­mo­ny at the BLCA can earn the fa­cil­i­ty any­where be­tween $7,000 and $12,000 de­pend­ing on the size of the halls need­ed. With its huge car parks, it has al­so be­come a pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tion for par­ties and con­certs.

“The BLCA can rake in be­tween $50,000 and $70,000 for host­ing a sin­gle par­ty. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the cor­po­ra­tion has al­so had Chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cal con­certs and oth­er sports in­clud­ing bad­minton, chess, cy­cling and kart­ing make use of the fa­cil­i­ty.”

Gar­cia fur­ther ex­plained, “What we are try­ing to do is po­si­tion BLCA as a mul­ti-pur­pose, mul­ti-use fa­cil­i­ty and this will go a long way in off­set­ting the main­te­nance costs. Hav­ing a ground up to in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dard, it is not cheap to main­tain BLCA and by hav­ing these events it goes a long way in off­set­ting the costs of main­te­nance.”

He added, “Crick­et is no longer sea­son­al. It is now played through­out the year be­cause we are play­ing crick­et in the rainy sea­son but the match­es are far and few be­tween and will not gen­er­ate the kind of rev­enue to main­tain the ground.

“The sta­di­ums and big grounds in the Unit­ed King­dom al­so utilise the ground to host oth­er events rather than just strict­ly foot­ball and crick­et be­cause with­out that you will not have a sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­el and what we are de­vel­op­ing for the BLCA is a sus­tain­able busi­ness mod­el that will en­sure that the fa­cil­i­ty is prop­er­ly main­tained and is fit for pur­pose.”

Gar­cia is right. When the Eng­lish Pre­mier League foot­ball sea­son fin­ished on May 23, the next week, the pop­u­lar Amer­i­can rock band, The Killers, host­ed a con­cert at Ar­se­nal’s Emi­rates Sta­di­um in Lon­don. In fact, their UK tour would see them host con­certs at main­ly foot­ball sta­dia across the coun­try in­clud­ing St Mary’s Sta­di­um, home of Southamp­ton Foot­ball Club.

Gar­cia feels the per­cep­tion that the venue is be­com­ing less about crick­et and more about con­certs and con­fer­ences is an in­ac­cu­rate one. Since the start of 2022, he says there has been re­gion­al first-class crick­et at the BLCA, na­tion­al crick­et tri­als, ICC Un­der-19 World Cup match­es, re­gion­al Un­der-17 match­es, the Daren Gan­ga Acad­e­my as well as the Samuel Badree Acad­e­my have held ses­sions there which all cul­mi­nat­ed with the first in­ter­na­tion­al match at the ground on Ju­ly 29. How­ev­er, he says with the big-tick­et items slow to come by this year, di­ver­si­fy­ing the venue be­comes even more im­por­tant.

Wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant, right, of India tries to stump out West Indies Shimron Hetmyer during the first Gold medal T20I Cup match at the Brian Lara Cricket Academy in Tarouba, San Fernando. India won by 68 runs. Hetmyer scored 14 runs.

Daniel Prentice

“This year we will have four CPL games but oth­er than CPL and the in­ter­na­tion­al tour­na­ments you av­er­age a crowd of be­tween 1,000 to 4,000 peo­ple. That does not pro­duce the rev­enue to sup­port the main­te­nance of the ground and that’s why we took the de­ci­sion to ad­ver­tise and pro­mote the fa­cil­i­ty as a mul­ti-pur­pose fa­cil­i­ty,” Gar­cia said.

The BLCA may be the busi­ness mod­el that will guide a coun­try that is rich in sport­ing fa­cil­i­ties but poor in main­tain­ing them. Three of the most re­cent venues in the Cy­cling Velo­drome, Aquat­ic Cen­tre and Rac­quet Cen­tre may de­pend on it. Yet, chair­man of the Sports Com­pa­ny of T&T, Dou­glas Ca­ma­cho, has leaned in an­oth­er di­rec­tion.

He ex­plained to the Busi­ness Guardian, “Di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion is one of the ar­eas we have looked at over­time where we make it avail­able for oth­er events which are rev­enue gen­er­at­ing be­cause the sport­ing events tend to be na­tion­al in na­ture (na­tion­al teams or na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tions) and the state tends to waive that to the na­tion­al gov­ern­ing bod­ies as their con­tri­bu­tion but the gen­er­al rev­enue streams have to come from ma­jor events which are of­ten non-sport­ing.”

The Sports Com­pa­ny has al­so toyed with the idea of nam­ing rights sim­i­lar to that of the Amer­i­can Air­lines Cen­ter in Texas or Spo­ti­fy Camp Nou in Barcelona. Ca­ma­cho ad­mit­ted though that such a con­cept will have to adapt to T&T’s cul­ture.

“I think in T&T one has to not sell them­selves short but go with a re­al­is­tic propo­si­tion. Are we go­ing to get one ma­jor one? That’s go­ing to be dif­fi­cult un­less we get one of the ma­jor banks or in­ter­na­tion­al play­ers in the mar­ket­place. Maybe we can’t sell the nam­ing rights but we have to sell ar­eas like the track or the pool. Per­son­al­ly, I was hop­ing that we wouldn’t get less than $12 mil­lion on a long-term con­tract across 10 years,” the Sports Com­pa­ny chair­man said.

Be­yond di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and nam­ing rights, how­ev­er, a ma­jor push is un­der­way to part­ner with the In­ter­na­tion­al Cy­cling Union, the In­ter­na­tion­al Swim­ming Fed­er­a­tion and the In­ter­na­tion­al Ten­nis Fed­er­a­tion.

If these venues can be cer­ti­fied by their in­ter­na­tion­al bod­ies as re­gion­al satel­lite cen­tres, Ca­ma­cho says this could change the game in this coun­try. He used T&T’s triple Com­mon­wealth Games medal­list, Nicholas Paul, as an ex­am­ple, ex­plain­ing, “We pay for him to train in Switzer­land mean­ing the T&T Cy­cling Fed­er­a­tion and spon­sor­ships.

“We pay for the coach­es, for the ac­com­mo­da­tion, for the use of the cen­tre, for the mas­sages, the sport sci­ences and the re­verse would hap­pen here so that peo­ple will come here and pay for that. We will be cre­at­ing rev­enue not just for the cen­tre but an ac­tu­al sport­ing ecosys­tem which be­comes a busi­ness mod­el.”

Hav­ing the tag of a re­gion­al satel­lite cen­tre means the coun­try can ad­ver­tise the venues as such and wel­come the world for camps and train­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the win­ter months in Eu­rope and across the Amer­i­c­as. What­ev­er the busi­ness mod­el for each of them, there seems to be an ur­gency, not seen be­fore, to keep these new sport­ing venues from suf­fer­ing the fate of those that were built for the 2001 FI­FA Un­der-17 World Cup.