By Neto Baptiste
Although students and coaches alike have been anxiously awaiting the return of competition in schools volleyball, the sport’s coordinator within the Ministry of Sports, Rosely “Rosie” Lewis, has cautioned that there will be no competition until health authorities have given the all-clear.
Lewis said coaches and others within the ministry however remain active in hopes of keeping the student athletes active.
“Everybody keeps saying they want to go back to pay but we have to listen to the health professionals first before we go back into the schools and do anything. The coaches in the ministry have been doing a lot of training and for the last three months we were on the beach working with the coach that was here from Brazil and we had some of our students as well come out but so far we’re struggling,” she said.
Part of the efforts to keep coaches active while sharpening their skills Lewis said, was a recent beach volleyball course with Brazilian coach, Augusto Sabitini, in which a number of players and coaches participated.
“A lot of persons turned out to train in the beginning but towards the end some persons fell off because of work, commitment that maybe they had elsewhere but in the beginning it was awesome with a lot of people turning out to learn training wise or in how we train for the beach, in how we teach and even how we play so for the coaches it was a big plus,” he said.
There have been no school competitions across all sports since 2020 after the government halted all competitive play in March that year following the announcement of the country’s first case of the Covid-19 virus.