Youth football on the island is set to get a major injection from the Scotiabank NextPlay Cup.
So says Concacaf’s director of development Jason Roberts during a telephone interview today.
“The NextPlay Cup is more of a focus on the social impact on football and not so much the competition, but how we use football to increase the participation and ensure that we break the social barriers of football central to this project,” he explained.
The Scotiabank NextPlay Cup is set to be launched in Jamaica tomorrow, and will be extended to Barbados, Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago, which will see 56 school teams participating in the competition within the coming months.
“Throughout the competition, both boys and girls will compete, to ensure that both genders are given the opportunity to play sports, and especially football in a 7-3 to include ten players. We also wrote into the regulations that at any one time there must be at least one girl on the pitch. We want to ensure within the participation of this that as many people are given the opportunity to be introduced to football,” he said.
The former English professional footballer added the Barbados arm of the programme will engage athletes who are not part of the ongoing Guardian Group Youth Football Tournament.
“The clear focus of the programme is for young people who are not having access to sports to be part of this platform to make it to the school’s programme and the elite programme. The NextPlay Cup is about giving young boys and girls who are outside of that elite level an opportunity to participate in football,” he said. (RA)
