Women’s crick­et is set to have a fu­ture in the de­vel­op­ment of T&T with an em­pha­sis on teenage girl's par­tic­i­pa­tion.

To­geth­er with the sup­port of the T&T Crick­et Board and Cen­tral Sports pres­i­dent and coach Richard Ramkisson, who pledged over the week­end at the Ch­agua­nas West Con­stituen­cy Crick­et Train­ing Camp to make his­to­ry, by be­com­ing the first Pre­mier League I club to have a women’s team ready for com­pe­ti­tion in the do­mes­tic sea­son.

Ramkissoon made these com­ments at the crick­et train­ing camp, as it came to an end at the In­vaders Recre­ation­al Ground in Fe­lic­i­ty, in which 18 young women par­tic­i­pat­ed.

The T&T Women’s Crick­et As­so­ci­a­tion are cur­rent­ly run­ning the women’s game and is try­ing to at­tract young girls to grow women’s crick­et. Ramkissoon pre­vi­ous­ly stat­ed that there are pos­si­bil­i­ties for the same suc­cess with the girl's clin­ic as he had with the top-tier men’s club crick­et.

“We aim to mo­ti­vate the young boys and girls who were set back by the COVID-19 re­stric­tions for two years which was a se­ri­ous blow to their as­pi­ra­tions,” said Ramkissoon.

Ramkissoon said that a ded­i­cat­ed venue for women’s crick­et will help fast-track the op­por­tu­ni­ties for young girls, as well as en­cour­age oth­er top-flight men’s clubs to em­u­late Cen­tral Sports.

“We were pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to see the wealth of tal­ent of the girls who showed up at the Ch­agua­nas West Con­stituen­cy Camp which ran for sev­en con­sec­u­tive Sun­days. This helped me to de­cide that Cen­tral Sports will have a team in next sea­son’s women’s crick­et com­pe­ti­tion, hav­ing al­ready set the bar by play­ing with the men in the na­tion­al Re­serve League,” said Ramkissoon.

The head of the reign­ing TTCB T20 Fes­ti­val cham­pi­ons Ramkissoon, along with Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment Di­nesh Ram­bal­ly de­scribed the Ch­agua­nas West Con­stituen­cy Crick­et Camp as a "game chang­er".

“The young­sters, from age sev­en to 17, boys and girls, were ex­posed to a high lev­el of coach­ing in the ba­sics of the game in an en­vi­ron­ment which pro­mot­ed their holis­tic de­vel­op­ment,” said Ramkissoon.

The coach­ing staff was com­posed of an im­pres­sive list of for­mer and present Red Force na­tion­al team mem­bers such as Reyad Em­rit, Im­ran Khan, Kjorn Ot­t­ley, Kamil Pooran and Christo­pher Ram­saran. Youth de­vel­op­ment coach­es Amin For­ge­nie, and Anil “Dun­gi” Lakhan were amongst those who were al­so high­ly op­ti­mistic that sev­er­al fu­ture crick­et stars would have been set on a ca­reer path at this year’s camp.

MP Ram­bal­ly high­light­ed the ex­cel­lent ben­e­fits to the com­mu­ni­ty, not on­ly in cen­tral, but from dis­tant ar­eas such as Point Fortin, San Fer­nan­do, and Diego Mar­tin. He said the ini­tia­tive, in its sec­ond year, was de­signed to have a pos­i­tive im­pact on the minds of the chil­dren es­pe­cial­ly when so­ci­ety is be­sieged with very se­ri­ous chal­lenges.