Nigel Si­mon

Cash-strapped T&T Pro League club, San Juan Jabloteh will now be of­fi­cial­ly known as Adam's Con­struc­tion San Juan Jabloteh, at least for the next three years. This was stat­ed by the club's chair­man, Jer­ry Hospedales at the sign­ing of a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MoU) be­tween Adam's Project Man­age­ment and Con­struc­tion and Jabloteh at a me­dia launch held at the res­i­dence of one of the club's di­rec­tors, Wil­fred Es­pinet at #1 Mary Street, St Clair, yes­ter­day. The new ma­jor in­vestors in the club will take over from Colo­nial Life In­sur­ance Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (Cli­co) which dis­con­tin­ued the spon­sorhip of the club af­ter 16 years, in Sep­tem­ber 2010, fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the ma­jor in­sur­ance com­pa­ny.

While he did not dis­close the val­ue of the three-year deal, Hospedales com­mend­ed the own­er of the ten-year-old com­pa­ny, Imtiyaz Adam for his de­ci­sion to iden­ti­fy with the up­lift­ing of the un­der­priv­i­leged com­mu­ni­ties of the East-West cor­ri­dor. In ad­di­tion, First Cit­i­zens Bank (plat­inum) and TSTT (sil­ver) are al­so on board as spon­sors of the San Juan-based club while oth­ers have giv­en rea­son­able as­sur­ances.

De­spite the sup­port for the club, Hospedales said there was need for ad­di­tion­al re­sources if the club was to main­tain its his­tor­i­cal com­pet­i­tive­ness not on­ly in do­mes­tic but al­so re­gion­al com­pe­ti­tions. "Suc­cess in all av­enues of sport and cul­ture re­quires all busi­ness­es with ap­pro­pri­ate com­mit­ments to so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to en­gage the com­mu­ni­ties of T&T on a sus­tained ba­sis.

In draw­ing ref­er­ence to clubs in the Con­ca­caf re­gion, Hospedales said mem­bers of the board had tak­en no­tice of the ap­proach by clubs in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca main­ly on how they at­tract­ed and what kind of spon­sors they ac­quired. "In Cen­tral Amer­i­ca there is no one spon­sor that ful­fil the needs of any club while there seems to be no prob­lem with con­flict of in­ter­ests as well. Ac­tu­al­ly we saw one club be­ing spon­sored both by Co­ca-Co­la and Pep­si on its jer­sey. "We took no­tice of this and what mat­tered most is the de­vel­op­ment of the play­ers. Hospedales stressed that in or­der for clubs from T&T to be com­pet­i­tive at the Con­ca­caf Cham­pi­ons League lev­el a bud­get of more than US$2mil­lion was need­ed.