Frustration ekes at our Sports

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Tomorrow, 17 May 2008, will witness another occasion on which the National Sports Council will meet with the various national sports associations in St Vincent and the Grenadines.
As has been the case in the past many of the national sports associations have no reason whatsoever to be optimistic about the outcome of the aforementioned meeting. The agenda for tomorrow’s meeting is at best unclear and leaves far too much room for the major outcome to be just another round of old talk.

National Sports Assembly
Tomorrow’s meeting is apparently called under the National Sports Council Act where there is supposed to be a National Sports Assembly. Indeed the invitation suggests that it is a meeting of the National Sports Assembly. Such an organisation does not exist. That is the plain truth. Despite several attempts in the past to establish the National Sports Assembly it has never survived. The main reason for its repeated failure is quite simple. According to the Sports Council Act, the National Sports Assembly is intended to be a forum of all of the national sports associations duly constituted into an advisory body to the National Sports Council.
Since the NSC is a government appointed organisation and for the most part party political it has never really been eager to take the advice of the National Sports Assembly. The latter organisation, for its part, has always found that it was a waste of time for it to meet and make recommendations to the NSC only to find that it has not been given any sort of consideration.
Successive leaders of the Assembly have therefore given up in sheer frustration since to them it appeared that the government appointed NSC were immune to the fact that the recommendations of the Assembly came from people who were in the field and who had a sound understanding of the needs of their respective sporting disciplines.
Frustrated, the Assembly withered and died a natural death.
It is therefore something of a tragic irony to see the invitation to tomorrow’s meeting seeming to suggest that there is such a thing as the National Sports Assembly in existence.