WAL­TER AL­IBEY

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

wal­ter.al­ibey@guardian.co.tt

For­mer In­di­an bad­minton in­ter­na­tion­al Anuj Tal­war has been se­lect­ed on the coun­try's ju­nior bad­minton team staff ahead of the Care­ba­co Cham­pi­onships card­ed for Au­gust 17-20 at the Na­tion­al Rac­quet Cen­tre in Tacarigua.

Tal­war joins head coach Christo­pher Joachim as a guest coach along­side three as­sis­tant coach­es -Stephanie Mitchell, a for­mer na­tion­al stand­out, Ja­nine Reyes and Cedric Urqhart.

The quar­tet is now hard at work, at­tempt­ing to pre­pare a team to ei­ther bet­ter or equal the per­for­mances of the ju­nior team at the last Care­ba­co cham­pi­onships in 2019, coach Joachim said, adding that the ju­nior team did very well in all the dif­fer­ent di­vi­sions then in Bar­ba­dos.

Tal­war, an ex­pa­tri­ate from his com­pa­ny in In­dia, asked to as­sist in the team's prepa­ra­tion and was ac­cept­ed.

Joachim said the coun­try's ju­nior team, which in­cludes the Un­der-11 (eight play­ers), U-13 (eight play­ers), U-15 (16 play­ers), U-17 (16 play­ers), and U-19 (eight play­ers) di­vi­sions, have been work­ing re­al­ly hard to per­form at their best.

"The team has been com­ing to­geth­er, they have been train­ing hard. They have been jel­ly­ing nice­ly and I think we have the tal­ent to do re­al­ly well. I can't af­ford to be pres­sured be­cause I have to fo­cus on the de­vel­op­ment of the play­ers and the team," Joachim said.

"The train­ing pe­ri­od is a bit short, you can al­ways do with more time. We have to en­sure that the de­vel­op­ment is con­tin­u­ous. We have se­nior play­ers with more ex­pe­ri­ence help­ing out with the de­vel­op­ment of the younger ones.

"We have the tal­ent, so now we just have to con­tin­ue the coach­ing process."

Mean­while, the coun­try's se­nior team left on Tues­day for the Cen­tral Amer­i­can and Caribbean (CAC) Games in El Sal­vador. The two-mem­ber team com­pris­es Will Lee and Cheque­da De Boulet, both the se­nior na­tion­al women's and men's cham­pi­ons. They were joined by coach Anil Seep­aul.