GTTA welcomes reintroduction of tennis in schools
Flashback! Director of Sport Chris Jones hands over a table tennis board to the students of the Lodge Secondary School, in September, 2015.
Flashback! Director of Sport Chris Jones hands over a table tennis board to the students of the Lodge Secondary School, in September, 2015.

 

THE Guyana Table Tennis Association (GTA) welcomes the move by the National Sport Commission (NSC) to reintroduce the sport of table tennis in schools across the country.
President of the GTTA, Godfrey Munroe, contended that the move is pivotal in ensuring that the sport develops.“What we have done is to craft a project that seeks to re-introduce table tennis in a formal way into the schools system, basically targeting six GTU (Guyana Teachers Union) districts; so if we look at the National schools championship and we know those districts; there are different districts in different geographic areas.”
Munroe stated that the pilot project will see the full-time employment of coaches to work with various schools from the grassroots level.
“Basically the project seeks to hire a coach, who will work on a residential basis with the schools and the initial pilot will look at about fifty schools across Guyana. We want to target students from 6 to 13 years old, basically, because we feel, given the global situation, that will allow us to nurture the talent at an early age with the right technical and tactical elements of the game which will provide a feeding system for us,” contended the GTTA head.
According to the GTTA, the introduction of the sport in the school system will not only provide a large pool of players but also promote a more health-conscious society.
Munroe pointed out that the “objective eventually is to introduce lifelong skills in terms of developing healthy lifestyle among other things as well as to, establish a schools team so at the different age group categories, each school would have teams at 11, 13 15 based on if it’s secondary or primary schools.”
He concluded that the GTTA will be looking to develop a table tennis league, after assessing the effects of the project’s implementation over a period of time.
Just recently, Director of Sport Christopher Jones announced that the NSC is looking at two pilot projects for sport in schools with table tennis and lawn tennis set to take the stage.

By Stephan Sookram

 

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