Crisis in Caribbean sports governance

—Says Sir Hilary Beckles

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC – Principal of the UWI Cave Hill Campus, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, says there is a crisis in sports governance in the Caribbean which has the potential to detract from the quality performances being exhibited by regional athletes.

While not making specific reference to any sport, Sir Hilary said that such crises also served to portray the Caribbean negatively, and pointed to the need for administrators to be as fully equipped as the athletes they governed.

“We believe that the development of the human resources required for the administration of sport is as important as the provisions we make to enable sportsmen and women to perform well on the field,” Sir Hilary said at the Soccerex Americas Forum staged here this week.

“Around the world as you can see we’re having tremendous challenges in sports management, we’re having challenges in sports governance.

“In our Caribbean world we have reason to be concerned because while it is true that we have some of the finest sportsmen and sportswomen in the world, it is quite evident to everyone that our governance and our administration, they do have a long way to go.”

He continued: “And we cannot persist in an environment in which surrounded by excellence on the field, we are surrounded by crises one after the next in the areas of administration and governance, it diminishes the quality of what we do and it places the Caribbean in a negative light.”

Sir Hilary’s comments come against the backdrop of the most recent crisis in West Indies cricket that resulted in the one-day team aborting their tour of India over a pay and contracts dispute with players union, WIPA.

The leading academic, who has written extensively on the game, is a former West Indies Cricket Board director.

He said UWI served as a key institution in helping to develop not only athletes but the framework for good leadership and governance.

“Our belief at the university is that we have a role to play in assisting all of the sporting disciplines with the development of their skills as well as their management, their thinking, their strategies as well as the comprehension of the wider mission of their enterprise,” Sir Hilary contended.

On Tuesday, UWI Cave Hill Campus signed a historic Memorandum of Understanding with CONCACAF, the continental governing body for football in North, Central America and the Caribbean.

And Sir Hilary said UWI also hoped to play its role in developing the sport in the same way it had helped to shape the development of cricket.

“We have done some very good work in the area of building a high performance centre for the cricketing discipline,” he said.

“It is our plan to develop a high performance centre for soccer to enable this discipline to reach its full potential within the Caribbean context.”

He added: “What we have done so successfully in the area of cricket, we do hope we can do in soccer. That would be a magnificent recognition of putting our full support behind the soccer enterprise.”