The Sports Com­pa­ny of T&T (SporTT) and the T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vice In­dus­tries (TTC­SI) have part­nered to con­duct a na­tion­al sur­vey on sports par­tic­i­pa­tion and its im­pact on the econ­o­my of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

SporTT en­tered in­to a re­search re­tain­er agree­ment with TTC­SI over the pe­ri­od Au­gust 2020 to April 2021 as a means of ex­pand­ing part­ner­ships to cre­ate more har­mo­nious com­mu­ni­ties through ath­let­ic ex­cel­lence while analysing the scope and in­flu­ence of the lo­cal sports in­dus­try.

Vashti Guyadeen, TTC­SI’s CEO said, “Sports and recre­ation­al ser­vices rep­re­sent a US$1426 bil­lion mar­ket glob­al­ly, in or­der for T&T to dig in­to this pie we need to as­sess the state of the in­dus­try lo­cal­ly. The pri­ma­ry pur­pose of this col­lab­o­ra­tion is to map and track the mon­e­tary val­ue of sports to the econ­o­my of T&T.

This is a for­mi­da­ble task sim­ply be­cause we have not ef­fec­tive­ly tracked the con­tri­bu­tion of this in­dus­try to the Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct.

Hence the rea­son why this sur­vey is sig­nif­i­cant to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­u­lar­ly since we se­cured a high re­sponse rate dur­ing a pan­dem­ic”.

The sur­vey was ex­e­cut­ed vir­tu­al­ly over the course of four months (April to Ju­ly 2021) which gen­er­at­ed par­tic­i­pa­tion from 1,411 re­spon­dents.

The find­ings pre­sent­ed in the re­port are in­tend­ed to guide and dri­ve a re­vised strate­gic fo­cus for the sport­ing in­dus­try in T&T.

Ja­son Williams, SporTT CEO stat­ed, “It is in­te­gral to gath­er this type of in­for­ma­tion to bet­ter un­der­stand and analyse the sport­ing in­dus­try/ecosys­tem from a stake­hold­er per­spec­tive. This da­ta acts as a fun­da­men­tal ground­work which would help to guide de­ci­sion-mak­ing process­es for cur­rent and fu­ture de­vel­op­ment.”

“There is a high lev­el of par­tic­i­pa­tion in sport and recre­ation­al ac­tiv­i­ty. 92% of re­spon­dents par­tic­i­pate in sport and recre­ation­al ac­tiv­i­ty”. This was one of the five ma­jor pos­i­tive in­sights from the re­cent pub­li­ca­tion of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Sports Par­tic­i­pa­tion Sur­vey 2021.

It was struc­tured in­to four (4) key ar­eas of fo­cus:

* the eco­nom­ic con­tri­bu­tion of sport

* the lev­el of sport and recre­ation­al par­tic­i­pa­tion par­tic­u­lar­ly by ge­o­graph­ic lo­ca­tion

* feed­back on the sport­ing and recre­ation­al in­fra­struc­ture in place and the cit­i­zen­ry en­gage­ment with sport and recre­ation­al ac­tiv­i­ties

* how it im­pact­ed their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, health, and well­ness, as well as their lev­el of sat­is­fac­tion with gov­ern­ment in­put.

The oth­er pos­i­tive in­sights from the sur­vey in­clude:

The re­spon­dents who pro­vid­ed ser­vices to sport­ing/recre­ation­al bod­ies/events out­side of Trinidad and To­ba­go earned ap­prox­i­mate­ly $4 mil­lion in to­tal in rev­enue.

T&T ex­er­cis­es – 94% of re­spon­dents en­gage in some form of ex­er­cise.

A sig­nif­i­cant ma­jor­i­ty of re­spon­dents re­port­ed a boost in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty af­ter en­gag­ing in Sport or Recre­ation­al ac­tiv­i­ty. A com­bined to­tal of 93% re­port good and ex­cel­lent in­creas­es in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

SporTT and TTC­SI con­tin­ue to ful­fil their MOU with more ac­tiv­i­ty planned in 2022, specif­i­cal­ly with re­gard to the roll­out of the re­sults/find­ings of this na­tion­al sur­vey.