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Sunday, February 23, 2025

RE­TURN TO SPORTS

Huge responsibility on NGBs, stakeholders

by

Walter Alibey
1125 days ago
20220124

Though the gov­ern­ment’s re­turn-to-sport safe-zone ini­tia­tive has been re­ceived with wel­com­ing arms by all sports and their or­gan­i­sa­tions, the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of this be­ing car­ried out ef­fec­tive­ly has now been placed in the hands of the Na­tion­al Gov­ern­ing Bod­ies (NG­Bs) for each sport­ing dis­ci­pline and all of the oth­er stake­hold­ers.

Bri­an Lewis, pres­i­dent of the T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee (TTOC) on Mon­day joined with the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB), the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) and the Na­tion­al As­so­ci­a­tion of Ath­let­ic Ad­min­is­tra­tion (NAAAs) in giv­ing ku­dos to Min­is­ter of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Sham­fa Cud­joe, who has spear­head­ed this re­turn over the past month or so, how­ev­er, he is­sued a call to na­tion­al sport­ing bod­ies and all of T&T that this will not work with­out strict com­pli­ance, self-dis­ci­pline and ad­her­ence to the COVID-19 coun­ter­mea­sures.

Lewis re­mind­ed all that COVID-19 is re­al, say­ing: “There is a risk and we have to mit­i­gate these risks. The sci­ence is out there in terms of what needs to be done, what are the tools in the tool kit, so to speak, and it in­cludes vac­ci­na­tion, mask­ing, so­cial dis­tanc­ing, hand hy­giene and res­pi­ra­to­ry hy­giene, test­ing, con­tact trac­ing, and tem­per­a­ture checks etc. It is not some­thing that the Trin­bag­on­ian cul­ture of try­ing to find some­thing around it will suf­fice.”

Min­is­ter of Sports Sham­fa Cud­joe, fol­low­ing her re­lease that con­firmed the gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to have sports in a safe zone on Sun­day, sought to clar­i­fy cer­tain ques­tions to­day, say­ing the reg­u­la­tions be­gan yes­ter­day and will run for just over two months as a tri­al pe­ri­od.

She as­sured that when that pe­ri­od is over, de­ci­sions will be made as to whether it will be con­tin­ued, ex­pand­ed or stopped.

“The reg­u­la­tion now pro­vides for reg­is­tered and recog­nised na­tion­al gov­ern­ing bod­ies and sport serv­ing bod­ies to re­turn to play.

It is a phased roll-out so we’re work­ing with the reg­is­tered groups first and al­low­ing the gen­er­al pub­lic to get a bet­ter lev­el of vac­ci­na­tion.

It will al­low us the op­por­tu­ni­ty to do some mon­i­tor­ing of who is vac­ci­nat­ed and who is not be­cause, up­on en­try at the spe­cif­ic fa­cil­i­ties, you’re go­ing to be asked to show your ID and vac­ci­na­tion cards. We’re us­ing the CPL tem­plate that was de­vel­oped in T&T in 2020 and is now be­ing used through­out the re­gion and in many oth­er coun­tries around the world and we’re us­ing some of the lessons we’ve learnt from oth­er coun­tries al­so.”

TTCB to use Com­pli­ance Of­fi­cers

T&T Crick­et Board pres­i­dent Az­im Bas­sarath and his ex­ec­u­tives have been ahead of the game and have gone the ex­tra mile to con­vince the gov­ern­ment that they will en­sure strict com­pli­ance.

Bas­sarath, who earned his fourth term in of­fice ahead of lo­cal crick­et, fol­low­ing last year’s An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing (AGM) and Elec­tions, said his ex­ec­u­tive is in the process of train­ing peo­ple to be­come com­pli­ance of­fi­cers for every match of the com­ing do­mes­tic crick­et league.

This he not­ed, will be fol­lowed by an all-out ef­fort to do what­ev­er is nec­es­sary to en­force the reg­u­la­tions are ad­hered to.

“The T&TCB has been very proac­tive in the sense that, it has agreed that for every game that will be played un­der the aus­pices of the TTCB, there will be a Match Ref­er­ee/Com­pli­ance Of­fi­cer at that venue, so that is good news. We can guar­an­tee the min­is­ter of sports, we can guar­an­tee the gov­ern­ment that at every game that is played from a zon­al per­spec­tive and a TTCB per­spec­tive, these peo­ple will be there to en­sure that the teams, match of­fi­cials and every­body fol­low the covid pro­to­cols to en­sure that no pro­to­cols are breached and that we are go­ing to en­force what­ev­er has to be en­forced to make sure that we ad­here to the reg­u­la­tions of the gov­ern­ment. We have al­ready start­ed putting things in place to have peo­ple trained to make sure that as soon as crick­et starts in T&T we peo­ple will be as­signed to these venues.”

Fol­low­ing the is­su­ing of the re­lease on Sun­day, Basarath and his team have al­ready sched­uled a meet­ing at 8 pm tonight to have dis­cus­sions and make de­ci­sions mov­ing for­ward. The lo­cal crick­et boss said that while he is ex­cit­ed to re­sume do­mes­tic crick­et, he first has to take a look at the reg­u­la­tions to de­cide on how they move for­ward.

He said: “For a long time now, since No­vem­ber, we is­sued press re­leas­es in­di­cat­ing that the T&TCB had put every­thing in place to com­mence the sport in our beloved coun­try. At the very first we in­di­cat­ed to the na­tion­al pop­u­la­tion that we have agreed at the ex­ec­u­tive lev­el that on­ly vac­ci­nat­ed play­ers will be al­lowed to par­tic­i­pate at our tour­na­ments and al­so on­ly vac­ci­nat­ed of­fi­cials will of­fi­ci­ate at our tour­na­ments. We were very hap­py with the news, con­cern­ing the re­sump­tion of sports in T&T. How­ev­er, we are still await­ing the reg­u­la­tions. I haven’t seen the reg­u­la­tions as yet to in­di­cate what are the fa­cil­i­ties that they are in­di­cat­ing in the orig­i­nal re­lease. With re­spect to what I have read in the re­lease, it would in­di­cate that the com­mu­ni­ty grounds across T&T will not be ap­proved for the re­sump­tion of sports, be­cause the in­clu­sion of the spe­cial fa­cil­i­ties in the orig­i­nal re­lease, pos­es some se­ri­ous ques­tions as we speak.”

NAAAs to add more ad­min work

George Comis­siong, pres­i­dent of the NAAAs who is now in on­ly his first term, said his ad­min­is­tra­tion will em­brace the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to en­sure that track and field is con­duct­ed ac­cord­ing to the min­istry’s reg­u­la­tions.

In spite of the lock­down, track and field have been one of the on­ly sports to have been in op­er­a­tion last year. To date, the sport has missed two week­ends of ac­tion which Comis­siong in­tends to make up for this week­end.

The lo­cal track and field boss con­firmed that while they will have to do a bit more work to en­sure that the reg­u­la­tions are ad­hered to, he not­ed that it will not be any­thing new for him and his ad­min­is­tra­tion.

“For us, it was ex­cel­lent news, but we await clar­i­fi­ca­tion on one of two small ar­eas. Train­ing as we know it now, clubs must lim­it the num­ber of per­sons for train­ing ac­tiv­i­ties to 10 at the dif­fer­ent sta­dia. So there are slots dur­ing the day and clubs have to ap­ply to train dur­ing those slots. They are lim­it­ed to 10 per­sons but we don’t know if that would have changed overnight, so there is an is­sue there that’s linked to train­ing. We ex­pect and plan to keep our num­bers, in terms of clus­ters of ath­letes, with­in 10 per­sons. With an eight-lane track that is al­right, once we sep­a­rate the heats and so on, and en­sure that the ath­letes wait­ing to com­pete are prop­er­ly so­cial­ly dis­tanced and so on, we don’t an­tic­i­pate any prob­lems.”

He ex­plained: “It cre­ates a lit­tle bit of ad­min­is­tra­tive work on our path be­cause in ad­di­tion to all the covid pro­vi­sions we have in place, the com­ple­tion of the track­ing form be­fore en­try, the san­i­ti­za­tion and the tem­per­a­ture checks, it means we must now add ver­i­fi­ca­tion of your vac­ci­na­tion sta­tus and then have you san­i­tize when you en­ter.”

Un­der Comis­siong, the NAAAs has held over 13 events in 2021 at the Dwight Yorke Sta­di­um and Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um among oth­er fa­cil­i­ties. This Comis­siong said this was done cour­tesy of an op­er­a­tions man­u­al that guides the way they or­gan­ise events.

Mean­while, the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion through its act­ing gen­er­al sec­re­tary Amiel Mo­hammed said: “The Min­istry of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment is very wel­comed. We are now await­ing the reg­u­la­tions to re­view and then we would be in a bet­ter po­si­tion to chart a course for­ward based on that, and how it aligns with our pre­vi­ous plans.”


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