Clay­ton Clarke

NAAA pres­i­dent Ephraim Ser­rette has de­scribed 2011 as year of mixed suc­cess for lo­cal ath­letes on the re­gion­al and glob­al stages. Speak­ing at the As­so­ci­a­tion's an­nu­al gen­er­al meet­ing re­cent­ly Ser­rette re­port­ed that ju­nior ath­letes con­tin­ued to do well against their Caribbean coun­ter­parts. He said: "At the Carif­ta Games, which were held in Mon­tego Bay, Ja­maica dur­ing the pe­ri­od April 23-25, our field ath­letes main­tained their abil­i­ty to com­pete with the best in the re­gion. At the Pan Amer­i­can Ju­nior Cham­pi­onships, World Youth Cham­pi­onships and Com­mon­wealth Youth Games, our ju­nior ath­letes main­tained con­sid­er­able suc­cess." The for­mer na­tion­al sprint­er sin­gled out Kel­ly Ann Bap­tiste's bronze medal per­for­mance at the World Cham­pi­onships in Daegu, South Ko­rea in Au­gust. He said: "At the se­nior lev­el our women were out­stand­ing at the World Cham­pi­onships cham­pi­onships with Kel­ly Ann Bap­tiste be­com­ing the first fe­male to medal in the sprints at this lev­el plac­ing third in the 100m fi­nals. They al­so broke the na­tion­al record for the 4x100m re­lay, just miss­ing out of a medal, plac­ing fourth in the fi­nals."

Ser­rette al­so high­light­ed the per­for­mance of the CAC Age Group team which cap­tured gold medals for the first time ever. "Spe­cial men­tion must be made of our CAC Age Group team which per­formed cred­itably at the cham­pi­onships where we picked up our first ever gold medals as well as cham­pi­onship record in the girls' un­der 15 High Jump (Ayana Glas­gow)," he said. The mon­i­tor­ing and eval­u­a­tion con­sul­tant cred­it­ed the suc­cess­es to the sup­port giv­en by the sports' ma­jor spon­sors, which in­cludes the gov­ern­ment of T&T and Adi­das. He said: "the As­so­ci­a­tion con­tin­ued to utilise our Adi­das spon­sor­ship and take full ad­van­tage of the as­sis­tance from Gov­ern­ment through the Min­istry of Sports, the Sports Com­pa­ny of T&T in or­der to car­ry out our ef­forts to­wards steady and con­stant im­prove­ment in the sport of track and field in Trinidad and To­ba­go." The Fair­leigh Dick­in­son Uni­ver­si­ty Man­age­ment Ac­count­ing grad­u­ate high­light­ed that part of the fund­ing has gone in­to as­sist­ing clubs to stage lo­cal meets and added that the as­so­ci­a­tion's Web site was over­hauled in the last year to "to re­spond to the chang­ing needs of our mem­ber­ships and we con­tin­ued our re­brand­ing by adopt­ing a new lo­go."

Mean­while, sec­re­tary Al­lan Ba­boolal in pre­sent­ing his re­port called for more di­a­logue be­tween the as­so­ci­a­tion and the Min­istry of Sports.

Ba­boolal de­scribed the post­pone­ment of the Na­tion­al Open Cham­pi­onships, due to the in­abil­i­ty of the Gov­ern­ment to com­plete re­pairs to the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um, as "a ma­jor dis­ap­point­ment to the as­so­ci­a­tion". The for­mer marathon run­ner al­so said track and field clubs con­tin­ue to bat­tle with foot­ballers for the use of the sta­dia. "The un­avail­abil­i­ty of train­ing fa­cil­i­ties at the sta­dia con­tin­ues to pose a chal­lenge as clubs have to make their way for foot­ball on any giv­en evening with­out no­tice," Ser­rette stat­ed. For­mer na­tion­al ju­nior hur­dler Althea George-Bus­by was elect­ed as a com­mit­tee mem­ber to re­place Ali St Louis who passed away in Oc­to­ber. George-Bus­by is the coach of To­ba­go Jaguars Ath­let­ic Club.