President of the Guyana Amateur Swimming Association (GASA), Dwayne Scott has signalled his intention to decentralise the discipline.
The Sea Otters Swimming Club executive told Stabroek Sport that there is a wealth of talent outside of Georgetown and as such, he believes it is pertinent that they expand to facilitate those hidden talents.
“We are hoping to improve involvement from places around and beyond Georgetown which would include Essequibo, Linden, Berbice, Kwakwani, Ituni, Rupununi and these places where we have talent,” Scott explained.
“We also want to look to get a home for the Linden club because at the moment they don’t have a facility to train,” he added.
Scott revealed that the major issue with the rural areas was the lack of information on the athletes.
“The goal is to work with the Ministry of Education as a stakeholder to reach out to these areas to try to improve and see how we can get these people involved in the sport,” he said.
Upon assuming the leadership role, Scott had told this publication that one of the major challenges the sport faces was that swimming was limited mainly to just Demerara.
“I think the biggest challenge existing for the sport is growth. Currently we are confined to one county, two towns, in Georgetown and Linden. We do not have any stakeholder partners except the Olympic Association, FINA [Federation Internationale De Natation] and the Government of Guyana, these are challenges that pose risk to the development of the sport and we have to work with the private stakeholders to secure long-term partnerships to help us grow the sport,” he highlighted.
“We have to reach out to towns and counties beyond Demerara to have more involvement and to have more athletes, we currently only have three athletes vying for Olympic times and we need to increase that pool and the only way we can do that is by targeting more athletes and the only way we can do that is by having more involvement,” he suggested.
Scott was elected to the helm of the body during their biennial elections last Saturday. Supporting him will be Elke Rodrigues and Randolph De Santos who will serve as Vice President Administration and Vice President Technical respectively.
Yelema Phillips was elected as Secretary while Valmakki Singh was given the nod in the capacity of Treasurer. There was no nomination for the position of Assistant Secretary/Treasurer but the body will ask teams to make a nomination once they convene.
