The sand re­quired for the com­ple­tion of the Beach vol­ley­ball venue at Black Rock in To­ba­go for the Com­mon­wealth Youth Games which starts on Fri­day, has fi­nal­ly ar­rived. The Sand was pro­cured from Guyana and ac­cord­ing to a post on the Of­fice of the Chief Sec­re­tary’s face­book page on Sun­day, the Sil­i­ca grade sand was of­floaded at the Scar­bor­ough Port on Sun­day.

With the Com­mon­wealth Youth Games sched­uled to open in three days time, the Min­is­ter of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Sham­fa Cud­joe says the Com­mon­wealth Games Fed­er­a­tion is un­hap­py with the tardy prepa­ra­tion at the Cour­land site.

“All fa­cil­i­ties and test games must be done by a cer­tain date, that should have been the end of June and we had pushed it back to Ju­ly 29. So when we were un­able to have test games last week for Vol­ley­ball, We all be­came a lit­tle con­cerned. I re­ceived a let­ter from the Com­mon­wealth Games Fed­er­a­tion pres­i­dent (Dame Louis Mar­tin) say­ing that she was con­cerned, and I’m dis­ap­point­ed.”

Speak­ing on To­ba­go Chan­nel Five’s Morn­ing Show on Mon­day Cud­joe added, “We want to have a prac­tice that’s the best thing to do with in­ter­na­tion­al games. It’s no time to prac­tice when it’s time to have the game. So even if that means over the last cou­ple of days, we’ve been meet­ing with the Com­mon­wealth Games Fed­er­a­tion, the Trinidad and To­ba­go games as­so­ci­a­tion, the TTOC and the lo­cal or­ga­niz­ing com­mit­tee and ex­plor­ing dif­fer­ent ways to get it done even if it means push­ing back in the games in To­ba­go.”

How­ev­er, Min­is­ter Cud­joe is op­ti­mistic that the play­ing ar­eas will be ready in a day. “We are hop­ing that the two courts could be laid out be­tween to­day (Mon­day) and to­mor­row. We push to have the test events by Thurs­day so that we re­main on sched­ule right now. The vol­ley­ball games are set for five days from Au­gust 5. If we start lat­er, on Au­gust 6, we would have to run teams, one af­ter the oth­er with no break in be­tween. Of course, that would mean more work for the run­ners, the vol­un­teers and bus dri­vers, every­body. So we’re hop­ing that we don’t have to push it back.”