De­serv­ing stu­dents from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies De­vel­op­ment and En­dow­ment (D&E) de­part­ment will ben­e­fit from fi­nan­cial sup­port when the UWI D&E Fund hosts its ninth an­nu­al UWI Golf Chal­lenge at the Point-a-Pierre Gold Club, to­mor­row.

Giv­en the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the tour­na­ment for­mat–a three-golfer scram­ble–and the chal­lenge of the course on the par­tial­ly un­du­lat­ing fair­ways, com­pe­ti­tion is ex­pect­ed to be keen af­ter the 10 am shot­gun start.

"To date some 500 stu­dents have earned our Golf bur­saries worth $2.5 mil­lion and close to 3,000 stu­dents have re­ceived sup­port from the fund," said board sec­re­tary, Vic­tor Cow­an.

An awards func­tion will fol­low af­ter the day's play at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5 pm where teams and in­di­vid­u­als will be re­ward­ed with at­trac­tive util­i­ty or en­ter­tain­ment prizes for their golf­ing prowess. As is tra­di­tion, the fes­tiv­i­ties con­tin­ue af­ter­wards with the ex­change of the days' ex­pe­ri­ences af­ter the prize-giv­ing seg­ment.

This year, in a bid to en­cour­age the de­vel­op­ment of golf in T&T, the or­gan­is­ers will in­tro­duce coach­ing ses­sions for youths be­tween the ages of nine to 12. They will be tu­tored by golf pro­fes­sion­als and will be ex­posed to the struc­ture of the game, the ba­sic me­chan­ics of the golf swing, golf eti­quette and some prac­ti­cal demon­stra­tions. Tour­na­ment di­rec­tor Ron Ameer­ali speak­ing on the tour­na­ment said, "We see this as plant­i­ng the seeds for the next gen­er­a­tion of golfers and so we have opened this to par­tic­i­pants of the tour­na­ment to bring along their young ones for coach­ing and guid­ance."?