T&T Hockey Board President Willard Harris has apologised to the senior men’s and women’s teams, who were on Wednesday forced to withdraw from the seventh edition of the Senior Pan American Cup at the Cancha Celeste in Montevideo, Uruguay, due to a lack of funding.
The 2025 Pan American Cup, the quadrennial international field hockey championship of the Americas, organised by the Pan American Hockey Federation, has eight teams in both the men’s and women’s competitions and serves as the qualifier for next year’s FIH Hockey World Cup in the Netherlands and Belgium.
In the men’s tournament, T&T, qualified as the winners from the 2024 Pan American Challenge, were set to face Chile in their opening match today in Pool B ahead of matches against Mexico and Canada.
Three-time defending champions Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and the USA will contest Pool A.
In the women’s Pan American Cup, it was expected to see T&T feature against Chile on Friday, followed by clashes against Mexico and the USA, while champions Argentina, Canada, Paraguay, and host Uruguay contest the other group.
Earlier this week, Willard Harris, president of the T&T Hockey Board (T&THB), admitted that they were still awaiting the release of $1.9 million in funding to purchase tickets for the team.
And in anticipation of their sudden departure for the tournament, the players and technical staff of both the national men’s and women’s teams were told to keep their phones close and expect sudden phone calls for immediate departures to the tournament, as the T&THB was in constant communication with the Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs officials working on the matter.
However, according to one parent, the phone call never came, and now both the T&T senior men’s and women’s teams have been forced to miss out on a chance at qualifying for the World Cup.
Reached for comment. Harris said he first wanted to apologise publicly to the players and staff who have given so much of their time and efforts in preparing for this tournament.
“I’m sorry that it has come to this, but we have tried our utmost to keep them focused on the preparations and stuff for participating and giving all the best for the country. We have been trying our best to get the necessary support funding. That hasn’t happened, and I apologise that we could not make it happen.
“I understand that there will be a lot of anger and disappointment and stuff, but we urge them to move forward, and let’s try and build better hockey going forward,” stated Harris.
Quizzed as to how the situation with the national men’s and women’s hockey teams’ participation at the Pan American Hockey Cup reached this disappointing end, Harris first explained the process the T&THB utilised to acquire financial support from the government.
The T&THB boss noted, “Funding of national team sports, like hockey, requires us to really go through the funding channels, which is through the Sport Company of T&T (Sportt), which then would review our request and go up to the Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs, and depending on the amount in question, it goes up to Cabinet.”
He continued, “The T&THB submitted our request in April just before the general elections because we qualified for this tournament some time ago. The women qualified from the last Pan Am Cup as automatic qualifiers because of their placing, and the men had to go to Peru last year and compete in the Pan American Challenge, and they qualified as winners, after which we submitted our budgets. Before that, we would submit our funding requirements or possible funding requirements in advance of tournaments because sometimes things happen and things change, and you qualify for a tournament mid-stream, depending on the timeframe, so you put in an estimate. We put in our final estimate in April, and this was before the general election or just around that time.”
He added, “The government changed, and the Sportt board wrote to us and acknowledged they had received our request, but they didn’t have a board, and they were pursuing whatever they had to do in order to forward it to the relevant authorities. This continued, and we enquired, and we kept enquiring about it. They (Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs) asked certain questions after additional information, which we supplied, and over the past week we have been continuously asking what the position is. Is it that we are getting the money, and are we getting the approval? Because we have booked tickets, booked hotels and stuff, because there are requirements, and this is a major qualifying tournament for the FIH Hockey World Cup for this part of the Americas.”
Harris noted the tournament in Uruguay is expected to attract a wide international audience, and with their non-participation, the T&THB could face possible penalties, fines and bans.”
He explained that, “ESPN is doing coverage of the event, and if we do not attend, we would be subject to penalties, fines and sanctions, which could be punitive. These may range from a loss of any deposits that have been put towards the tournament, like your entry fee, any deposits to a hotel or anything like that.”
He said, “We got a release of US$7,000 for that purpose a few weeks ago because we were seeing that the hotel was threatening to cancel our bookings, and we got that, so we were hopeful that the rest of the money would have been approved and released, but that has not come.”
“In addition to that, we would be fined by the Pan Am hockey federation under their withdrawal policy because we are deemed to be withdrawn, and we will also face any cost that the local organising committee in Uruguay has incurred so far with regard to preparation for T&T, like any other teams; that cost, once audited, would be subject to us paying that,” he said.