Thirty of the region’s best and brightest football coaches have been put on a path to spread the knowledge of the game all across the Caribbean as they were engaged in Barbados this past week in the CONCACAF Train the Trainer Regional Programme.
The programme got off the ground on Wednesday at the Parkinson Resource Centre, and the hand-picked group soaked up all the knowledge, skills and expertise on offer from seven of the top instructors under the CONCACAF umbrella.
Coaches from Cayman Islands, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados underwent intense training until yesterday in a programme headed by CONCACAF development managers of the Caribbean, Etienne Silee and Andre Waugh, along with the assistance of course instructors Vinimore Blaine, Antone Corneal, Neal Ellis, Jocelyn Germe and Leonard Lake.
During the course remarks, Silee, who has spent more than 30 years in the coaching, highlighted the importance of knowing one’s strength and said it was in this strength that the region would find its way forward in the sport.
“From what you are to your ambitions, you need to plan and before you plan, you need to take into consideration your reality. One of our big realities in the Caribbean is our diversity but it is also our strength. In lots of periods before this, we used to copy and paste a lot of things. It doesn’t matter if it was from Ireland, the Germans, the Dutch, French or from England. But we have never considered our own. Our own strength which lies in our people. We have a lot of experience. We have always done it in our own way, taking into consideration all the constraints, and that was the strength that we have never recognized,” Silee said.
In his first official appearance since being appointed Caribbean Football Union president, Barbados Football Association head Randy Harris drew reference to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal of reparative purchases of sugar and bananas and said that the region now had to find its own way and not wait on the parent federations.
“The Caribbean now has to become self-sufficient . . . FIFA and CONCACAF, God bless their souls, are giving courses and we are attending them but there is no thread to bring success. I want you all to change that. You are the crème de la crème of the Caribbean, and the whole object of having you here is that you will be a pioneer in making sure that the football in the Caribbean becomes successful within five years. You have got to set goals and always have a plan,” he said. (PR)