-says AAG president Aubrey Hutson
During Minister Nicolette Henry’s address to the National Assembly which was part of the 2017 Budget debate earlier this month, she said that: “synthetic tracks will be laid in regions 2,4,6,7 and 10 for which $210M is allocated.”
The establishment of the facilities will no doubt augur well for Guyana’s premier athletes, most of whom are based in the city and in Linden.
However, President of the Athletic Association of Guyana (AAG) Aubrey Hutson said yesterday that investing in facilities at this point may not necessarily be the answer to further develop the sport.
Investing more in the human resource, the athletes and coaches would be Hutson’s approach.
“We embrace having the new facilities. We always welcome new initiatives in our sport but sometimes we have to know where our priorities are and I thought before an announcement like that was made, discussions should have been held with the Athletic Association of Guyana of what is best needed to move the sport forward.” Hutson added “But if they announce that they will build five new stadiums around Guyana, that is great, it will improve athletics, it will improve on the venues that we will use for our development but I think we need more funding in certain areas. Particularly training of coaches and we need to look at our programme holistically from how our athletes move from juniors all the way up to a senior level and see how best we can put together a structural programme to make sure that that transition is smooth.”
The AAG head added: “Facilities with the pool of athletes that we have may not necessarily be our priority if we would have had the kind of money to invest.
“If you look at our tertiary institutions and their athletic programmes, it’s almost non-existent so how does an athlete aged 17 coming out of high school do next with their athletic career moving forward? We would have liked to see a little more plugged into the area of developing athletes here and giving them international exposure with the small pool of athletes, some sort of funding should have been plugged into their development,” Hutson ended.
