By Amanda Hermanstyne
No one would argue that of all the problems facing the development of sports locally, the lack of financial resources is probably the greatest contributing factor to the stagnation of local sports.
Sports associations need money to run their programmes. They need money to print flyers advertising upcoming tournaments; and money to place advertisements in newspapers informing of upcoming elections and other such matters.
They need money to run off tournaments and money to buy equipment necessary for the staging of those tournaments.
A few local associations get funding from their parent body, funding which by and large is usually a closely guarded secret.
Apart from the Guyana Football Federation which gets an annual subvention from FIFA of $250,000, it is difficult to state which other local association gets a grant from its parent body.
Certainly associations receive no funding from the government although organizations sometimes do benefit from the largesse, if one can call it that, from government officials.
As such most sporting organizations are forced to rely on fund raising activities, entrance fees and levy fees from staging tournaments and sponsorship from business places.
The lack of funding for local sports associations have proved effective in blocking the development of those associations. Most associations have problems running off their yearly programmes and many are unable to attend regional and other championships.
This has led to a situation whereby athletes who can afford to pay their own way to attend championships are often allowed to do so leading to a situation where representing one’s country is no longer an honour to be earned but one which can be bought.
To be fair there are a few what one would term good corporate citizens who keep sporting activities alive.
Sports associations owe a great lot to these companies and should endeavour at all times to try and maintain a good relationship with those companies for the future of sport in Guyana is at stake here.
One supposes that in the forseeable future that sports associations might be able to receive funding from government and that the infrastructure so necessary in the production of world class athletes will be increase from one stadium which is sadly, only for cricket and football.
One hopes that for the New Year, that sporting associations will try to bring much needed planning to the table so that they will be able to decided much earlier than is now the case what games they will be attending and the composition of the team to those games.
