Man­ag­er of the Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers (TKR) Col­in Bor­de is mak­ing a call to cor­po­rate Trinidad and To­ba­go to use the ve­hi­cle called sports to their ben­e­fit.

Bor­de said: "In the Caribbean, we have so many su­per­stars, sports­men and sports­women, par­tic­u­lar­ly in track and field, cy­cling, swim­ming and crick­et, etc. We haven't utilised these ath­letes' pop­u­lar­i­ty to be able to reach out to the com­mu­ni­ties and glob­al mar­kets in mod­ern ways and to show youths en­ter­ing the sports that it is a good are to ex­ploit in their so­cial de­vel­op­ment."

Bor­de, the most suc­cess­ful man­ag­er in the his­to­ry of the CPL with four ti­tles, al­so had a word of ad­vice for the gov­ern­ment in terms of sport tourism. "We have a new Genre that is be­ing ex­plored when it comes to sports. As an ex­am­ple, EA SPORTS, through its games, comes to your hous­es around the plan­et. It then takes you to the dream of des­ti­na­tions that sports fans want to vis­it.

"This is a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty to ad­ver­tise the coun­try on a glob­al scale. When you go out there peo­ple know Trinidad and To­ba­go be­cause of the ath­letes main­ly. We need to tap in­to this through sport."

Even sport­ing bod­ies have to change the way they ap­proach prospec­tive spon­sors be­cause of the times we are in, ac­cord­ing to Bor­de of Queen's Park Crick­et Club. "In an en­vi­ron­ment where bil­lions of dol­lars of for­eign ex­change are avail­able. It's ex­treme­ly im­por­tant that sport­ing or­gan­i­sa­tions and the req­ui­site fa­cil­i­ties that ser­vice these sports recog­nise that a new era is up­on us. The crowds will even­tu­al­ly come back but the way that busi­ness is done at the ne­go­ti­at­ing ta­ble has to be changed.

"Spon­sors are keen to change their busi­ness mod­el in a cli­mate that de­mands the use of tech­nol­o­gy in reach­ing out to spon­sors clients. Sport­ing bod­ies need to work with their spon­sors. Now it has to be a part­ner­ship, not just a spon­sor­ship.

"If we wish to reach out to com­mu­ni­ties and help to de­vel­op the next gen­er­a­tion of stars. We need to mod­ernise our ap­proach to work­ing to­geth­er with the pri­vate sec­tor as well as the var­i­ous gov­ern­ment bod­ies that as­sist. It can­not be on­ly as­sis­tance from the Govt and just send­ing in­voic­es and prac­tis­ing good ac­count­ing.

That is not suf­fi­cient. In­no­va­tion and the courage to change your busi­ness mod­el is the on­ly way to sur­vive and thrive. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are un­lim­it­ed."