By Neto Baptiste
Coach of the Power Speed Endurance (PSE) athletics club and a member of the Antigua and Barbuda Athletics Association (ABAA), Ted Daley, has publicly thanked psychologist Lennox Doran for voluntarily assisting five young athletes after they were denied an opportunity to represent Antigua and Barbuda at this month’s World Athletics Under-20 Championships in Lima, Peru.
The athletes had hit qualifying marks in various events for the August 27-31 game but have been denied the opportunity to compete due to an administrative blunder,, which saw the association missing both the initial registration deadline and an extended deadline of August 12.
“The session with the athletes went extremely well and as a result of that the athletes are in a much better place today. After the session, we went to Big Banana as a club with some of the parents, sat down and had something to eat and you could see the difference after the session with Lennox; you could have seen the difference and in conversation with some of them, you sense that they are in a different place than they were a few days ago,” he said.
Doran, through the Good Morning Jojo sports show, reached out to Daley offering his assistance as the mental state of the athletes came into question following the huge disappointment.
Efforts to get a response from President of the association and former national athlete Everton Cornelius proved futile as he refused to speak on the issue. Reports however indicate that only a number of executive members could access the portal used to register the athletes.
Daley explained how the process works.
“World athletics communicates with partners in two ways. They have general information so anyone [public] could go online and see the general information, and then they have specific information that is sent to various federations.
“So what they have done is assign a mailbox to each federation and the mailbox is accessible by your password. The password is sent to your president and the president would then issue the password to whomever the president deems fit, so most persons in the organisation would not have access to the password.
“We would have to wait for the two persons or whomever the president gives [the password] to access the information and then feed us with that information,” he said.
