IN December 2020, competitive football made a return in Guyana under the COVID-19 guidelines with the Bounce Back Classic which was successfully hosted at the Guyana National Stadium. This put a new lease on life for the football fraternity as associations try to incorporate their plans with the pandemic parameters.
Guyana Football Association (GFA) is one of the leading associations governed by the Guyana Football Federation (GFF). According to president of GFA, Otis Gibson, plans are apace to get the sport going at all levels. Gibson said: “The GFA at this time has embarked on a series of different things to create a new structure at the GFA, relative to the plans that the Federation (GFF) put in place.

It’ll help us in a better way but at the same time we still need to create a structure that we can manage.”“GFA will benefit tremendously from the GFF because in recent times we never really used to get a lot of funding to do a lot of things. For instance, the monthly stipend is back on track. The GFA can say, well, we’re back on track with the monthly stipends. The Guyana Football Federation has provided more than a million dollars or more to help you (associations) to develop your league,” James disclosed.He further added: “We already started with some meetings in the last year, but next Wednesday we’ll be having a general zoom meeting where all the clubs will be invited to put the systems in place. We wanted everybody to get his house in order, to make certain everybody keeps elections.” Also on the agenda for GFA is the development of their grassroots and senior levels for both male and female.

He added that the association is embarking on a total development plan, where it tries to ensure that all the senior coaches must have a licence or a certificate of sorts from the Federation and go on to have a D-Licence within a year or two. The president said, “You will see some programmes or a note very soon in a new month, most likely, in March, because by March, we hope to get COVID under better control that we have it now. “So those are some of the plans because if we don’t have good teachers we can’t have good students; so there’s where it all starts. It all starts with recreating, and not just an admin plan – a plan to get on the pitch and get on the pitch in a meaningful manner.”