By Iva Wharton
Sponsorship for the continued and sustained development of sport is being viewed as a long term commitment by Digicel, says its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Gregory Dean.
According to Dean, while it is possible that the company will sponsor other sporting disciplines the focus will remain on the major disciplines…“school sports, track and field, swimming, tennis and football.
“But if other things come up during the year we will do that as well because we are committed to youth development from a sporting point of view,”Dean added.
He said, however, that while sponsorship may be open for new disciplines, he feels that the company has covered most of the disciplines and promised that his company will continue to do so in the future.
“We have been involved across the board and will continue to do that in 2013.”
Dean opined that sticking with the programmes on a long term basis was what was needed to see real growth and development in sports, but, he cautioned, this will take time.
“When we started the schools football we said it would take 10 years before you started seeing the results of it. We still think it is a work in progress and there is room for improvement in some areas because we are seeing in some of these events that the players possess certain deficiencies. So, if there are going to be programmes to support the weaknesses in some of those areas, we welcome them.”
Dean said that competitions such as the Courts Pee Wee, the Milo Under-20 and the Chico schools football tournaments, are the programmes that are needed to complement the existing programmes.
“We like the fact that there a lot more of those programmes at the schools level,” he opined.
Asked if he can identify one particular sport where there might have been tremendous development, Dean said that would be difficult.
“Measuring development on an individual basis would be difficult as in squash, we are Caribbean champions while we have seen more schools participating in the schools football competition which means a lot more players have been able to showcase their talent.
So I don’t think that we can chose one to say that it is better than the other because there have been improvements in all of the disciplines.”
The cell phone company is easily among the major sponsors of sport in Guyana.
