Voting to identify the awardees for the 2010 National Sports Awards will take place tomorrow morning at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall.
This was confirmed following a meeting yesterday afternoon at the National Sports Commission (NSC) office of the selection panel tasked with identifying the awardees for the National Sports Awards.
At the meeting yesterday details pertaining to voting and the various nominees were reviewed by Director of Sport Neil Kumar and the selection panel.
Speaking to Stabroek Sport yesterday, Kumar stated that his office had already received all the nominations.
These nominations, he stated, were in turn circulated among the members of the selection panel and voting for the awardees in the respective disciplines is set to take place tomorrow. The Director of Sport explained that they have received nominations from 23 associations.
“We have had a meeting with the associations and the NSC has pulled all these things [nominations] together and circulated a broadsheet to the panel,” said Kumar.
He also disclosed that the NSC has resorted to using the old criteria for identifying nominees for the various awards, because although meetings were held with associations to clarify the new criteria, “associations still nominated athletes based on the old format.”
“When we looked at the whole thing [nominations], we decided we will go back to the old format. We will not introduce the new format because the nominations based on the new criteria were not enough,” Kumar explained.
According to Kumar, only two of the 23 associations that nominated athletes selected their nominees based on the new format.
The NSC and the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport had announced a new list of criteria for nominees for the 2010 National Sports Awards.
A document was also distributed to all the various sporting disciplines in Guyana with a list of criteria outlining a system for points to be awarded to nominees based on performance and achievements at different levels during the last year. The document was drafted by the National Sports Commission, headed by the Director of Sports and is aimed at making the selection process as fair as possible.
However, Kumar explained yesterday: “Most likely we will go with the old points system. The associations did not nominate according to what we asked for. Only like two did… People did not live up to the new system. We have to hold more seminars and introduce the system to them.”
