Lack of a sporting culture and a disconnect between national programmes and those administered by the National Sports Council (NSC) have served to frustrate efforts to produce elite athletes.
And Steve Stoute, president of the Barbados Olympic Association (BOA), has called for sport to be placed on the curriculum to help build that culture.
“If you examine our schools, sport in schools is a pastime. So students participate on their own volition and after the Inter-School Sports is over, the encouragement to continue from the school really decreases until the next year they get some motivation to do well for the school,” Stoute said during a press briefing on Wednesday at the Olympic Centre.
“The first thing we need is within the educational system that sports be placed on the official curriculum as happens in many parts of the world. In the United States, they tend to go overboard where you are marked on your performance in sport, but I think most of the colleges now, you must have a certain academic level before you can compete in basketball and so on. That is one of the things we need.”
