T&T Pro League club, Cen­tral FC launched their 2013 youth teams at J-ZZ's In­ter­na­tion­al Steak­house in Cou­va on Feb­ru­ary 27 and an­nounced that their pri­or­i­ty is to de­vel­op young Cen­tral foot­ballers in­to pro­fes­sion­al play­ers.

At the event, the Sharks in­tro­duced their youth team spon­sors, Toy­ota, JZZ's and SIS and al­so con­firmed that an­oth­er Cen­tral based com­pa­ny, Su­pe­ri­or Readymix Ltd had stepped for­ward to spon­sor the clubs re­serve team.

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, Brent San­cho said that while the club would love to win tro­phies, the club was al­so very much fo­cused on de­vel­op­ment. "It would be easy to just adopt an ex­ist­ing team to rep­re­sent Cen­tral FC," said San­cho.

"But that's not the way we want to do things at this club. We held tri­als across the re­gion and are proud to say that the teams tru­ly rep­re­sent the whole of the Cen­tral catch­ment area."

San­cho said that the phi­los­o­phy of the club is to re­cruit play­ers at age 11 or 12 and feed them through the var­i­ous teams un­til they reach the se­nior lev­el.

"The cream al­ways ris­es to the top. Just as Barcelona have six or sev­en first team reg­u­lars who came through their youth sys­tem, so will Cen­tral, and that can on­ly bode well for the na­tion­al team in five or six years time," San­cho said.

Youth de­vel­op­ment man­ag­er, Kevin Jef­frey said that build­ing the teams had been a mam­moth task. "We're in the mid­dle of our Re­serve team sea­son and to build three ad­di­tion­al teams from scratch has been no mean feat. How­ev­er, we were de­ter­mined not to take short cuts and lay a strong foun­da­tion for the fu­ture."

Jef­frey said the strat­e­gy is not ex­pect­ed to bear fruit in the first sea­son, as the teams will need to play com­pet­i­tive games in or­der to gel."As with our se­nior and re­serve teams, they will take time to bed in and we have re­al­is­tic ex­pec­ta­tions. This is a de­vel­op­men­tal year at all lev­els of the club, but we un­der­stand that suc­cess on the field will come our way, and once the for­mu­la is set, we will be recog­nised as a club who iden­ti­fies and de­vel­ops qual­i­ty young foot­ballers," he said.

Op­er­a­tions di­rec­tor, Kevin Har­ri­son, said that while the club hoped to un­earth fu­ture first team play­ers through their youth teams, those that don't quite make it will still ben­e­fit from play­ing with the club.

"Maybe some boys will win over­seas schol­ar­ships and of course we hope one or two might be signed by clubs in Eu­rope or North Amer­i­ca. But those that don't make it to pro­fes­sion­al foot­ball will still be able to ob­tain job ref­er­ences from the club. Aside from de­vel­op­ing the boys' foot­ball skills, we aim to in­stall a sense of dis­ci­pline, re­spect and re­spon­si­bil­i­ty in the play­ers which will help them progress in life. We will em­ploy our slo­gans 'Shoot Goals Not Guns' and 'Join A Team Not A Gang' to try to keep them out of trou­ble and fo­cused on be­com­ing role mod­els in their com­mu­ni­ty."

T&T Pro League Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer Dex­ter Skeene urged the Gov­ern­ment to put more sup­port in­to foot­ball. He said that many young peo­ple play the game and there­fore it makes sense that if you want to keep young peo­ple out of crime you should in­vest in the ar­eas that in­ter­est them.

And San­cho al­so had a mes­sage for the Min­is­ter of Sport. He said, "Cen­tral FC re­ceives no di­rect fi­nan­cial sup­port from the Gov­ern­ment, un­like the oth­er non Gov­ern­ment teams in the League. De­spite that, we have worked far hard­er than oth­er clubs to build pride with­in our com­mu­ni­ty. We've as­sist­ed Se­nior Cit­i­zens and kids from the Chil­drens Home.

"We've dis­trib­uted food parcels to the poor­est peo­ple in our re­gion and vis­it­ed many schools. We even step out­side of our com­mu­ni­ty and last Fri­day held ca­reer sem­i­nars at Queen's Roy­al Col­lege in Port of Spain. Every pen­ny that we need has to be raised via spon­sor­ship, where­as our com­peti­tors re­ceive fi­nan­cial sup­port from the Min­istry."

San­cho said that this cre­ates an un­even play­ing field.He went on to con­firm that the club had ap­plied for the sub­ven­tion, but re­ceived no re­ply. "We will be writ­ing to the Min­istry again," said San­cho.