NIGEL SI­MON

nigel.si­mon@guardian.co.tt

T&T se­nior women's net­ball team coach, Wes­ley "Pepe" Gomes has made a plea of the Min­istry of Sports and oth­er cor­po­rate bod­ies to come on board ear­ly as pos­si­ble in sup­port of the team's prepa­ra­tion for the 16-na­tion 2019 Net­ball World Cup in Eng­land lat­er this year.

For­mer World Cham­pi­ons in 1979, along with Aus­tralia and New Zealand, the 'Ca­lyp­so Girls' have failed to fin­ish among the top four teams in the com­pe­ti­tion since a joint sec­ond place fin­ish in Scot­land in 1987 with the best fin­ish since then be­ing sixth, in Birm­ing­ham, Eng­land in 1995.

Four years ago, in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, the Rhon­da John-Davis T&T led squad end­ed in ninth spot.

How­ev­er, fol­low­ing their stel­lar show­ing at last year's Amer­i­c­as Net­ball Fed­er­a­tion As­so­ci­a­tion Cham­pi­onships (AF­NA) in Bar­ba­dos where they swept all chal­lengers to end with a per­fect 7-0 record, coach Gomes has tar­get­ed re­turn­ing the na­tion­al women's team to the top brack­et of world net­ball when the 15th edi­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion jumps off at the M&S Bank Are­na, Liv­er­pool, Eng­land, from Ju­ly 12 to Ju­ly 21.

But, in or­der for Gomes and his team to have a chance to fin­ish among the medals, the team must be ful­ly pre­pared men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly.

Speak­ing yes­ter­day, Gomes not­ed that the T&T women will not have it easy as they have been placed in a tough group with Ja­maica, South Africa and Fi­ji in their four-team round-robin Pool C.

"Since we got back home from the AF­NA Cham­pi­onship we have de­vised a train­ing plan where­by we hope to have all the play­ers train­ing for no few­er than 25 hours week­ly, main­ly do­ing tech­ni­cal work at this point in time."

"I must say the Min­istry of Sports has been very sup­port­ive in terms of us get­ting ac­cess to the fa­cil­i­ties to train, but the prob­lem we are hav­ing now is with play­ers be­ing avail­able due to work com­mit­ments.

"From the core of 16 plus play­ers we have short-list­ed, we on­ly have two play­ers who can com­plete the full 25 hours of train­ing week­ly, where­by they train twice dai­ly, so we will need to have fur­ther dis­cus­sions with the play­ers and see how best we can get around this is­sue of them meet­ing train­ing tar­gets set".

He added, " We al­so have most of the play­ers liv­ing out of the city, so what we are look­ing at is get­ting some­where to house the play­ers when we have train­ing on af­ter­noons, where they can overnight as well as have a prop­er sup­ply of meals and oth­er nu­tri­ents."

Last year, pri­or to their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the AF­NA Cham­pi­onship, which served as the World Net­ball Cham­pi­onship qual­i­fiers, the Min­istry of Sport and Youth Af­fairs came to the as­sis­tance of the T&T Net­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (T&TNA) with $100,000 in fund­ing.

But Gomes, while hap­py that the funds were made avail­able, said he would pre­fer if things are done much ear­li­er this time around.

"We need mon­ey to house these play­ers so we can be­gin train­ing as a full group.

"We are ex­pect­ed to bat­tle with South Africa for the all-im­por­tant sec­ond spot in the pool be­hind Ja­maica, and while we are strug­gling to get our full core of play­ers, South Africa is prepar­ing its team to con­test a quad-se­ries against host Eng­land, New Zealand and reign­ing cham­pi­ons, Aus­tralia on Jan­u­ary 13, 19 and 20.

Should fund­ing be­comes avail­able soon, Gomes stat­ed the plan is for the team to leave for Eng­land, no few­er than three weeks be­fore the start of the Cham­pi­onship.

"We toyed with the idea of play­ing some warm-up match­es from Feb­ru­ary, but our main shoot­ers, Kali­fa Mc Collin and Saman­tha Wal­lace (Aus­tralia) will be out of the coun­try.

"In fact, Mc Collin has al­ready start­ed the Eng­lish sea­son while Wal­lace is due to leave soon for pre­sea­son train­ing with her club in Eng­land, so hav­ing to play match­es with­out them will not re­al­ly give us the chance to work on what we want too."

"So by ar­riv­ing in Eng­land prob­a­bly the first week in Ju­ly, we will be hop­ing to play a few more warm-up match­es than usu­al."

Gomes al­so point­ed out that he's coach­ing the team for free and need to find ways of fi­nanc­ing his trav­el­ling to and from prac­tice.

"I don't earn a salary from coach­ing the team, so dur­ing the day I have to sub­sidise my earn­ings in some oth­er ways, which al­so means I will be spend­ing less time with the team on a dai­ly ba­sis, so hav­ing funds made avail­able to the as­so­ci­a­tion for the team as soon as pos­si­ble is very im­por­tant," end­ed Gomes.

Gomes is al­so hop­ing that De­fence Force's Jameela Mc Carthy and Fire Ser­vice's Ane­i­cia Bap­tiste will both join the train­ing ses­sions soon.