Gross sporting imbalance in SVG

The Challenge
Sport is seen as facilitating the well being of the human being. It is a wholesome thing to practice sport. It facilitates discipline, encourages self-confidence, cooperation and engenders strong bonds of friendship and camaraderie.
Sport allows for the engagement of individuals' time, taking them into positive activities.
Sport facilitates the accessing of competition and the honing of skills. It allows for access to professionalism in a particular sporting discipline engendering fame and fortune and is often a gateway to education scholarships and attendant professional careers.
There is a real tragedy in St Vincent and the Grenadines where sport is concerned. The authorities allow themselves to be so blinded that have rendered themselves incapable of change.
The authorities have displayed a clear, unadulterated and unforgivable bias towards cricket, a sport in which few Vincentians have the opportunity to make it big in the international arena.
For some strange reason the authorities have ignored the potential of sport to enhance the global image of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Perhaps they do recognise this potential but are afraid of it if only because it may detract from their own global recognition.
The challenge before those still involved in sport is to cultivate their organisations into professionally administered institutions. The challenge is to make their sports more visible by getting to the children, making alliances with the television stations to do more by way of coverage of their sporting activities. The challenge is to offer parents and their children the opportunity to play together in this or that particular sport and strengthen the bonds of the family while facilitating the honing of the skills of the young.
The challenge is to ignore the obvious bias towards cricket and elevate their respective sporting disciplines to national popularity through commitment and hard work.
Despite the chronic prejudices displayed by those in authority towards cricket others porting disciplines have laboured and attained much higher levels of success. Football is now ranked 85th in the world. Kineke Alexander has been at the top of the NCAA in the USA and has ranked highly among the 32-member Central American and Caribbean region. Pamenos Ballantyne is the best road-runner in the Caribbean. Fabrice George is the best Under 14 tennis player in the Caribbean as was the case with Corey Huggins some time ago.
The challenge is for the other sporting disciplines to continue to see excellence as an achievable goal. Perhaps, only then would cricket come back to earth and be treated as one of the several sporting disciplines from which Vincentian children must choose.