Anand Ram­per­sad

As the Min­istry of Sport in col­lab­o­ra­tion with a sport­ing agency pre­pare to host a con­fer­ence dis­cussing ways sport can be con­cep­tu­alised and trans­lat­ed in­to a vi­able busi­ness in­dus­try, it is im­por­tant that the lessons from oth­er sport ven­tures as a tool for de­vel­op­ment be iden­ti­fied and dis­cussed open­ly.

Mis­takes from these ven­tures must nev­er be re­peat­ed as it on­ly amounts to an in­ef­fi­cient use of scarce re­sources.

Politi­cians, pol­i­cy mak­ers, ad­min­is­tra­tors and prac­ti­tion­ers to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween the 'De­vel­op­ment of Sports' and 'Sports for De­vel­op­ment.' This is re­quired to save the 'in­no­cence' of sports from be­com­ing the prover­bial ver­bal foot­ball of politi­cians and the gen­er­al pub­lic for all the wrong rea­sons. In re­cent times a lot has been said about sports, how­ev­er, a great deal has ei­ther been over­sim­pli­fied, over­es­ti­mat­ed, omit­ted and or to­tal­ly ig­nored. As a corol­lary sport is be­ing sad­dled with an un­pleas­ant char­ac­ter and im­age. Look at what is hap­pen­ing with FI­FA who are charged with ad­min­is­ter­ing ar­guably the one's most pop­u­lar sport. In­stead of talk­ing about the ex­ploits of play­ers, the dis­cus­sions is fo­cused on al­leged ques­tion­able ad­min­is­tra­tion. Time will even­tu­al­ly pro­vide the 'truth'.

The 'De­vel­op­ment of Sports' fo­cuss­es on ath­letes ex­celling in their re­spec­tive sport­ing dis­ci­plines on the world stage. There­fore, the sig­nif­i­cant fo­cus is on tal­ent iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and the pro­vi­sion of re­sources-fund­ing, train­ing fa­cil­i­ties, schol­ar­ship etc–to ath­letes rep­re­sent­ing the coun­try on the world stage such as the Olympics where gold medals and world records are the ul­ti­mate re­turn on such in­vest­ments. The ob­jec­tives, tar­gets and out­comes of the 'De­vel­op­ment of Sports' are clear­ly stat­ed and mea­sur­able. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, op­por­tunis­tic po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic ac­tors use any ster­ling per­for­mances on any sport­ing world stage to serve their re­spec­tive caus­es.

On the oth­er hand, 'Sport for De­vel­op­ment' fo­cus­es on sports as a means of build­ing the so­cial life of so­ci­ety es­pe­cial­ly as it re­lates to health, com­mu­ni­ty in­te­gra­tion and ad­dress­ing so­cial is­sues fac­ing 'youth at risk' such as ju­ve­nile delin­quen­cy, gang ac­tiv­i­ties and a gen­er­al break­down in the so­cial fab­ric of the so­ci­ety. Al­though the ob­jec­tives are clear, the tar­gets and out­comes of 'Sports for De­vel­op­ment' pro­grammes are prob­lem­at­ic to mea­sure.

Two cost­ly pro­grammes (Hoop of Life and Life­S­port) were ini­ti­at­ed to ad­dress some of the so­cial chal­lenges fac­ing youth es­pe­cial­ly young males in the so­ci­ety. There is no ques­tion­ing that these pro­grammes were well in­tend­ed, how­ev­er the im­pact of these pro­grammes are un­known and no one seems in­ter­est­ed. Was the Hoop of Life a suc­cess and is it worth con­tin­u­ing? Why it is that the na­tion­al bas­ket­ball fed­er­a­tion could not field a team at the Caribbean Cham­pi­onship yet still 36 mil­lion dol­lars over a three year pe­ri­od was as­signed to the Hoop of Life pro­gramme? Did the in­tend­ed peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties ben­e­fit from this pro­gramme? Or did per­sons who would not have qual­i­fied to play un­der the rules of the com­pe­ti­tion ben­e­fit? Why the or­gan­is­ers did not con­sid­er and im­ple­ment a pro­gramme where the Hoop of Life com­mu­ni­ties were aligned to es­tab­lished bas­ket­ball teams from the Bas­ket­ball Fed­er­a­tion. This would have pro­vid­ed a space for more holis­tic free flow­ing de­vel­op­ment and so min­imise the neg­a­tive views of the pro­gramme.

Any at­tempt to ef­fec­tive­ly use sports as a means of ad­dress­ing 'youth at risk' re­quires an an­a­lyt­i­cal frame­work to as­sess de­viance and col­lect ro­bust and re­li­able da­ta to con­stant­ly eval­u­ate the over­all pro­gramme. To date, there has been much dis­cus­sion about the pro­grammes but lit­tle in­for­ma­tion forth­com­ing on the ba­sis of the re­spec­tive strate­gies have been im­ple­ment­ed. For in­stance who is de­fined as 'youth at risk'? Is the da­ta col­lect­ed thus far able to jus­ti­fy the con­tin­ued use of sports as a so­cial in­ter­ven­tion?

If the prob­lems fac­ing 'youth at risk' are re­lat­ed to struc­tured eco­nom­ic de­cline and in­equal­i­ties in the com­mu­ni­ties iden­ti­fied, why is there a be­lief that or­gan­ised youth sport pro­grammes will solve the many prob­lems? In oth­er words, if at the end of the day the youth has to re­turn to so­cial and eco­nom­ic con­di­tions that do not al­low him to use his new­ly ac­quired skills, how will the pro­gramme be viewed? Since the state is in­volved in these pro­grammes, is there any guar­an­tee to the par­tic­i­pants that the pro­gramme will con­tin­ue if a new gov­ern­ment is elect­ed or even if a new min­is­ter with­in the same gov­ern­ment takes con­trol of the pro­gramme? As much as the in­ten­tion may be good, it is im­por­tant that those who want to use sports as a means of qui­et­ing so­cial de­viance, to re­mem­ber that sport is on­ly a tool in the de­vel­op­ment process and as such must not be ex­pect­ed to pro­duce mir­a­cles.

The idea of the busi­ness mod­el for sport must be de­vel­oped fo­cus­ing on poli­cies, process­es and im­ple­men­ta­tion. Such an ap­proach would en­sure that the sport­ing in­dus­try will on­ly strive if it op­er­ates un­der prin­ci­ples of in­vest­ing for re­turns.

These re­turns will not on­ly re­dound to the sport in­dus­try but wider so­ci­ety. It will al­so pro­vide a frame­work to op­er­ate 'sport for de­vel­op­ment' or 'sport for all," so that all per­sons can have the same goal. For this to hap­pen, there is ur­gent need to re­vis­it the Sport Pol­i­cy where SCOTT was sup­posed to be es­tab­lished to over­see the op­er­a­tions of sport with no in­ter­fer­ence from the State.