 Good day and welcome to Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service. I'm your host, Jacques Kingston Compton. With me today is Director of Sports, Mr. Patrick Mathred, as Director of Sports in the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports. And he's going to talk to us a little bit about the role and the purpose of the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports. I know it's something that a lot of people may not necessarily understand, but we're gonna give them a more clear-cut view. So welcome to the program. Thank you very much and good morning to everyone listening to the program. Thank you for having me, first of all. And I must say that that's really a very significant question because we've been asked all the time what exactly we do as a Ministry of Sports. But one would clearly understand that first of all, that you are a government institution and therefore there's a number of bureaucracies that you have to adhere to in terms of what it is. But our raison d'et, so to speak, is really about youth and sports development. But from the spotting standpoint, we are a government ministry to provide a level of oversight over sports in St. Lucia. That is the National Sporting Associations, the what's happened in the community in terms of community sports and some other programs. But once it's sports, then the Ministry has a role to play and our role is largely that of oversight. Though sometimes what we do, we do more than just oversight, but we do a level of programming because it's necessary in order to provide that level of oversight. And where exactly are you all located at the moment? Currently, we are on Meekwood Street, number 55 Meekwood Street, saying that means nothing to a lot of people. We have to continue and say we're opposite access and on top of Huntington. And then people will know exactly where the offices are. We've moved there, we've been there for the last three years, previous to that. We have been to, we were at the Blue Coral Mall. Previous to that, we had the Bossage Stadium for a little while. Previous to that, we were. So we have moved the number of locations and maybe that's one of the things that I would like to see that the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports have a stable home, but currently we're number five Meekwood Street, 55, sorry. So your role as director, could you talk a little bit about it? Well, sure. The director of sports, some people say to me sometimes it's a lot. I don't believe it is a lot from the standpoint that yes, there are a lot of routine things that you do from a day-to-day basis. But generally as the director of sports, what we really do is to supervise and as I indicated earlier, provide oversight on a number of things. You have a number of employees who work within the Ministry. They refer to us as youth and sports officers and I have direct oversight over them. Then you have coaches. We do have a number of coaches within the Ministry. And then on a daily basis, then you have to interface with a number of sporting associations. Few people know that we have 25 national associations operating in St. Lucia. And so you have to interface with them on a daily basis. And of course, you have the St. Lucia Olympic Committee and you have other partners within the corporate sector that you deal with. Part of what I do generally, apart from that day-to-day supervision, there is always policy pronouncements as from the government of the day and which you as the director of sports would have to action. And I could speak clearly of one that we're working on now. We basically are at the stage of the first draft, which is the Facilities Management and Maintenance Policy. I had direct oversight of that. We had a small committee. We're basically in the stage of the first draft. And so that is some of the other things that you're doing. Of course, as anything else, because of government bureaucracy, there are things that you have to do in accordance with the Finance Act, the Procurement and Stores Act. And so you really, there's never a dead moment, so to speak. So I don't think unless I decide to sit and do nothing that there is a moment where I do nothing. Could you expand a little bit on the policy you spoke earlier? Okay, in terms of the policy, what we have found over the years is that there's been a lot of uncertainty as to where do we go in terms of Facilities Management and Maintenance. And one would appreciate that if you're doing sports, one of the key aspects of sports is the facilities that you use. And if those facilities are not in the top ship, then it means that it will affect the athletes and the users. And so the ministry is, although we would have had a policy, a very simple one, what we have done is to upgrade the policy to have a more, I don't say a complex policy, but a more comprehensive policy in ensuring that what we do is to look at the entire sporting facilities that we have in Senucia. I could just say to you quickly that although the policy is not out yet, but what we would have done is to put them into tales. So we have policies, facilities at the A, B, C and D level. And then we program in that particular level. So each of them comes with their own nuances and each of them would, of course, would have a different level of maintenance. And so very soon you would have the pronouncements from the minister. Of course, I don't want to steal his thunder in terms of the policy being unrolled. But we are at the point where we basically have the first draft. We're going to discuss it with persons, but I just say that the intention is by the end of December, we're going to next year that we'll have a solid policy on plane facilities, maintenance and management. Okay, now you also mentioned that you have coaches on staff. So I have a couple of questions are just related to that. For you to be a coach in the St. Lucia, do you have to work directly with the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports? No, no. Coaching generally, we paid a little lip service to coaches before. And so the Ministry had decided maybe about six years ago to start its own. We always had coaches, but we started with, years ago, maybe in the late early 90s, they're about with one cricket coach. And at the time, after it retired, we had moved to another one. So the Ministry then, and under the staff of the Ministry, generally under the public service, we have two coaches and an assistant coach. So we have three coaches directly with the public service. But that was just not enough for us. And so under a program through being funded by the National Lodges Authority, we've employed something like 20 other coaches that we have throughout the island. So we cover the spots of netball, basketball, table tennis. We do football. We've not done too much emphasis on football because the association is well endowed as far as we're concerned. We, as I said, table tennis, volleyball, and of course, netball. And those are the spots that we have coaches in. And what we do is to go out into the communities to try and develop grassroots in terms of ensuring that we have on the ground a whole cadre of young persons and maybe older persons getting involved in sports so that the associations could pick from. And so that is what our coaching program really entails. Of course, like you indicated earlier on that the coaching, the Ministry does not do coaching certification. However, what we do is to work with the various associations to ensure that the coaches are certified in that regard. There are a few generic things that we do. For instance, to work as a coach of the Ministry, you need to do child safe guarding. Now, it doesn't mean that if you're a coach of some level of repute that we will not hire you. But once you are into the Ministry, you must do child safe guarding and protection. And it's something that we put on every so often with our coaches. The other one which is essential is the whole issue of first aid. We call them first responders. Those are two key aspects that we must do. And of course, with our own in-service training, we do fundamentals to coaching to ensure that though you may come in saying that you have the coaching certification, we do our own checks to ensure that we get in what we put out for, that we get that. So it's not that you are responsible for the certification, but there are other bodies. Could you speak a little bit about what it entails for those coaches to become certified? Okay, so for instance, and again, it varies from spot to spot. So for instance, in terms of football, there is the D license, the C license, a B license. And so once these courses are offered, we encourage our coaches to go. In terms of netball, for instance, you have level one, level two, and run by the international federations. We encourage persons in terms of athletics. There are quite a number of levels in athletics. There's a level one, level two, level three at the basic level, but you could also become a jump scotch. You could become a sprint scotch. You could become a forward scotch. So there are other areas what it is. So as fast as possible, we encourage our coaches to go out. As a matter of fact, I want to say to you, cricket, for example, only recently, John Eugene, he did the level three coach. West Indies certified level three coach. However, he's not certified as yet because one would appreciate you do the theoretical aspect. And this is the thing about it. It will take him nine months in terms of his practical session and reporting in order to be certified as a coach. So what we say to them, you're trained at level three, but you're not certified. And in every instance, there is a practical component for coaching. Unless you do not practice or participate and pass that practical component, then you will not be certified. You may be trained. And of course, there's other things that you could do. But the certification always take a time because of the practical component. Okay, that's a lot to take in. But we're due for our first break. Stay with us. You're watching Issues and Answers. We'll be back in a moment. It's buzzing from the ninth to December 10th, 2021. From 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Castries Town Hall, he won or a national honey show under the distinguished patronage of the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security, and Rural Development, Honorable Alfred Prosper. The national honey show categories are honey in a jar, beeswax, baking with honey, art, and photography, and the Best in Show Challenge Cup. The head judge is Sue Carter from the London Honey Show. This event is sponsored by Ionola Apiculture Collective, Caribbean Youth Environmental Network, Ministry of Agriculture, GEF, SGP, UNDP, SLHTA, and CCC. For more info, call 452- for 900- or 717- 000. This is an activity of the GEF, SGP, UNDP. See you there. Welcome back to Issues and Answers. I'm your host, Jacques Kingston Compton, and we're here with Director of Sports of the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports, Mr Patrick Mathere. We're talking about his role and the role of the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports on the island. Now, the sports sector in a small island developing country as our own, you must have a lot of challenges in the sports sector. I mean, could you tell us a little bit about what you have to deal with? You're very correct, because the resources are a few and I dare say that people sometimes say, but you all get money from 3D association, you all get government money, what do you do with it? Your resources are still few, because what you want to do, you may never have enough resources to do. So what it really is, you have to perform that juggling act to ensure that whatever resources that you have, you maximize them. And generally, what we would do with what we do is a lot of training, a lot of training and a lot of involvement of persons on the community level. What we try to do as much as possible within the communities is to encourage persons to volunteer. Very, very slowly, we get a lot of pushback because persons nowadays almost say to you that what's in it for me? What am I doing? And they don't see, they see money as the only reward. And there are so many things because sometimes we laugh in the ministry and we joke and we call, we talk about paid voluntarism. And so we know that that sometimes may be a difficult thing, but that's the only way that we could use our limited resources to go out into the communities, get persons involved and have them do so. So our coaches would take the lead, but to get persons involved so all the time we could have a flow of persons. And hopefully they might get the coach and maybe leave the country and get an economic return from what they're doing. Is it, do you find it very difficult to encourage persons to volunteer? It is becoming increasingly so because persons do not see the value of voluntarism from the standpoint of a fulfillment. They see it as the tangible rewards. I don't look at the intangible rewards. And even the whole issue and I suppose when my fellow colleague comes and speaks about youth, we'll speak about ways in which we're trying to encourage persons for apprenticeship programs to maybe, when I volunteered, I was happy with just getting a little trip to go somewhere. Nowadays, when you give them the trip, then they say why is this typing to go with the trip? You understand? So I mean, because of how the economy has come and how persons start to think now, it's more difficult, but it is possible. It is possible. You could always encourage persons because at the end of the day, it brings the benefit to them to see other persons come out and develop in ways which they never expected. Right. So if, let's say I want to volunteer, who would I contact at your ministry? Normally, if that is the case, you could go through any one of the coaches that we have in the ministry, but you could also go through the number of youth and sports officers because we've divided the island on each area, well, not each area, but sections of the island of youth and sports officers because under sports, for instance, we have four youth officers spread throughout the island. You could have that discussion with them. You can come to the ministry. There are persons in the ministry not enough as to where or what is it that we do and could point you in that direction. So it's not something that is difficult. You come, you have that discussion first and we point you in the direction in terms of what is that you want. We want to also encourage persons, especially on a weekend, to bring the young persons out and to encourage parents to get involved in the lives of their children and the young people. You mentioned the youth officers, Elia. What exactly is their role? Okay, right now in the ministry, we have youth and sports officers and those are people on the field. Those are the people who are out there, who interface with the community and us. It's sometimes, it's a difficult task because monitoring of them could be difficult because one would appreciate that they do not work eight to four. They work right through. I was a youth and sports officer and the areas are large because there are few of us and take for example, one officer is responsible for grossly and Babylon. I mean, you could imagine the number of facilities and the number of persons. Yeah, I can imagine. So it is really a challenge for them but I must say that they do what they can within the limited resources we have. We're hoping that if we get at least eight more of those officers, then it will become even better for us but they actually go out and they do so and you see them out in the field getting it. It can be frustrating at times but my role as the director is to encourage them along because I understand exactly what they're going through because I used to be there myself. Yeah, because that's two very large constituencies. You just mentioned that grossly and Babylon. That's a lot. I'll tell you, another officer is responsible for ancillary canneries and Rosa Valley. That's what we did, that's what we did. So you do need more staff, I would say. Yes, definitely. But we also kind of briefly just touched on lack of resources in terms of money. Now, when you also find it difficult when you have to send, well, I don't know if your ministry is responsible for this but when we're sending athletes abroad, especially with Olympics, is that difficult? Are there a lot of challenges there? Is it a case of where it's difficult to raise money for those athletes? Let's say for LeVon Vardat. I think that you correct up to the point that it's always difficult to get the corporate sector involved. They do come forward, I must say. And we have a very good corporate sector, despite what people think. I think we have a very generous corporate sector, very extremely generous. But things like Olympics, they're different because for instance, the average persons would not know that the way that it operates with the Olympic Committee, and we do have the Central Olympic Committee Incorporated who would handle the Olympics. What happens is that they're qualifying standard set by the international federations. Once you would have met these international standards, it's almost like an automatic qualifier. But what happens is that you as the association who have those athletes, at a particular point you have to give your athlete a cross to the Central Olympic Committee. So the Olympic Committee takes over all the preparation for this committee. So once you made the standard, then they will take over. And everything is taken care of by the Central Olympic Committee, by the International Olympic Committee. So that one is an easy one. However, when you have other struggling associations, and I'll give you an example. The St. Lucia Rugby Association, who over the years have been making great strides in producing rugby, and you see the progress, especially for our female. They are in the process and the desires of taking part in what we call a seventh tournament. It is run, run seven. Now run is stands for Rugby's America's North, which is the parental body. There is an upcoming tournament, male and female in Mexico, sevens they have to bring in there. And when they put the budget together for that tournament, it's costing them over $200,000. Now I am saying the ministry does not have 200,000 dollars to give. The country and as we speak of... Especially not for just one spot. Exactly. But they determined to go. They determined to go. They have started fundraising. They have going. Of course the ministry would help because we normally deal through the National Lottery's Authority. We do that type of assistance, but it's a big ask, but they determined. And that is just one example of what you have to do all the time. Okay, we're actually due for our final break and after that we'll get to our final segment. You're watching Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service. Please stay tuned. We'll be back in a moment. What's in the food you're eating? Do you really even... The chemicals and hormones used to accelerate their growth. All the artificial flavoring. Sweeteners and colors too. We consume and we don't spare a thought for the damage that they'll do. No. Think about the children. Think about the children. How will we save it? Alts and GMOs are not the solution. Use organic and join. Excessive agrochemical use. Additives and genetically modified foods are harmful to health and the environment. Join the Good Food Revolution. Grow, buy and consume organic. A message from Rye St. Lucia and the Ministry of Sustainable Development with funding from the GEF Small Grants Program, UNDP. The Good Food... Welcome back. This is Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service. And we're here with Director of Sports in the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports, Mr. Patrick Mathura. And we're talking about the sports sector and his ministry's role in St. Lucia and the government. So, yes, we were talking a little bit about the rugby sector before in the sports sector. Now, while we were off air, you mentioned a little bit about our involvement in eSports. Let's talk about that because I find that very interesting. Well, eSports, as anything else, is a new sport. And when, years ago, we were struggling because this gentleman who's Franklin Vardes, I say who's the pioneer in pushing that came to us, those things were very skeptical because they saw eSports as, boy, you're playing video games, you understand? And they saw that as bringing us nowhere. I'm saying this has gone big. There's an international federation. There's a whole federation of eSports. It was introduced into the Olympic Games for the first time in the last edition. And so, it's very big for us. And we see that as another way, especially during the fact that COVIDs, you could stay at your home and play, get terminals. We think that's a very good alternative in terms of sport. Of course, as a ministry of sports, we'll never discount the fact that physical activity is what we want. So, yes, there's a level of physical activity involved in eSports, but not as much. But we do encourage, as a matter of fact, we do have a representative we'll be going out sometime in December. I think something to the 90th of December, there's a World Federation. World eSport Federation is an international tournament happening in Singapore. And we do have a representative who will be going out there. It's quite a tidism. You need to spend at least $20,000 for you to get to Singapore plus the COVID tests and all of to go out there. And we believe that our representative will do very good. And I think that's the second opportunity because previously there was a World Federation just before Olympic Games for the qualifiers. Unfortunately, we had a weather system. And so, the internet was giving problems. And on the day in question, he could not do it. And so, he was eliminated on that basis alone. So, as much as it's something that you could get involved easily, it could be easily put off. And I tell you, the gentleman was devastated. And so, that's just our way of showing, look, we can go far with this thing. It actually just occurred to me that for our viewers who might not even understand what eSports is, why don't you just give a little description of this emerging industry? OK. eSports, generally, you have a number of games that you do. Some of them that you see the game playing all the time on the Xbox and the other devices, that has become big. So, players compete amongst themselves. So, for instance, the FIFA one is a very big one. You have the Dragon Ball Z, you have those other spots that you see them as simple video games have taken on a life of their own. And people around the world get involved in them. And they have massive tournaments. One could look up eSports on the net, and you would see recently there's a massive stadium that was built to accommodate 50,000 persons for eSports. So, the terminals are there, and it's a big arena. Massive, massive. So, this isn't going to do further research on it. I wish I had more time to explain more about eSports, but do some reading. eSports is the up-and-coming spot for us. And perhaps we'll have you come back again just to speak about eSports on its own. But that really leads me to my next set of questions. I imagine eSports is very helpful in terms of the era of the COVID. So, I mean, tell us a little bit about how COVID has affected the sports sector and what the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports is doing to address those effects. I want to be biased here by first saying that I believe that the sports sector would have had this heat for COVID. Persons would disagree, but I'm a sportsman and I will go down there. No, I agree with you, actually. I'm sure it is high up there. And what we would have done was to encourage persons to do a lot of soul-seeking. As a ministry, what we did, we used the time, the long time for us to do a lot of policy, to review a lot of our policy and so on. And then what we do was to encourage our coaches, especially because they were getting frustrated, to put together a lot of coaching videos. So we have a lot of coaching videos out there. And when we got permission to go out one on one and two, we encourage them to do videos. So now you would see, for instance, that only on a daily basis, all our coaches are out there in the field, table tennis, volleyball, basketball, they send you videos of what they do with the terrain. What it has done for us now is to expose and open another area, which I think that we, not that we're not ready, but we are not trained enough to do, which is looking and assessing in terms of video. This is very, very, very big in the world. And I think that we have this opportunity now for coaches to look at videos and to do that type of analysis, video analysis, which has not been done before. And speaking of which, one of the, as we speak, there's another spot which we are heavily investing. The association has just been informed is something called TechBall. TechBall? TechBall. And it's a world spot, it's very big. As a matter of fact, we're thinking of sending and representing to the TechBall conference that's gonna happen in Poland sometime in December. It's actually a cross between table tennis and football. So you have like a tennis ball, a tennis board. It's a curve type of board. And then you use your foot to go over the net on that ball. It's a, let me tell you, another one that's growing big. And a lot of the club, the major clubs use it as a warm-up game, but it stands, it's a stand-up on its own. It's very, very big in Asia. That's another one that persons could look at. TechBall, T-E-Q, is T-E-Q-A, T-A-Q-I ball, TechBall. And so that's another one that's massive, massive. And we have athletes that are trading for that now, or it's something you are trying to... Well, we have just formed the association. So we have gone further from the association. You have persons now who are being trained to teach TechBall. Of course, we're not as good as the others as yet. And I think that's something in the future because of the hands and skills. Because remember, for us, sports is about muscle memory. And the more you practice, the more you train, the better you become. And so that is what COVID has done for us to force us in that direction to say, look, even if you're at home, if you do it one-on-one by yourself, the memory stays on and it continues. So we're encouraging that type of thing in our world of sports. So in terms of TechBall, how are you going to encourage new persons? I imagine that's challenging, to get new persons into that particular sport. The schools. The schools. This is the beauty of our system and this is the beauty of sports. Once you want a sport to mushroom, you need to go into the schools. Because what you have there, you have a captive audience. You have that captive audience and you have young, impressionable minds. Once you start to train them from then, as I indicated, the whole issue of muscle memory, then they get better. By the time they leave school or they go out in the world, you have some professionals in that type of thing. So the key to sporting development in St. Lucia is the schools. Of course, you have the communities that you cannot discount because they go into the community. But once you get the schools on board, half your business is done. We're very close to the end of our program. But what I want to just have you briefly talk about is maybe the future of the sports sector or the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports or anything else you want to add before we go. Okay, well, thanks for that opportunity. I think that in terms of the sports sector, I think there is huge opportunity. I think as director of sports and I've been in sports for a little while, just over maybe 40 years. And I'm seeing that what we need to do now and I want to coin that term is to professionalize sports. Professionalize it from the standpoint, not for us to decide that we want to pay persons but to professionalize it from the standpoint that we have to take a serious guided approach to sports. We have to look at sports analysis. We have to look at stats in sports and using sports to get what we want. We have to use the technology that we're using. We have to train administrators, train coaches in that manner so that they could go out there and now really and truly revolutionize sports into an industry, which is what it is actually. It has become an industry but we way behind in terms of what I seem to call the sports industrial revolution. And this is what we need to go. If we don't take this thing forward, we need to do so. And maybe, as I speak, maybe the Ministry of Sports might not be able to do it. Maybe the Ministry of Sports will have to look for outside help, maybe the government or some other agency has to set up to take it forward. But in my own mind, my own experience I believe this is the way forward for sports because Jamaica, sports is big. It helps the economy. I think we'll do the same. I believe that if we get it right, forget about bananas, forget about tourism. Sports would be your number one industry. Thank you very much. That's a lot to go on. And I hope maybe, as you say, we can catch up with the rest of the world. Maybe we'll even have our own Usain Bolt at some point. But I hope you can come back again onto a program, maybe even to talk about the emerging sports programs like rugby, tech ball, e-sports, all that sort of thing. But thank you very much for coming on our show and I hope to see you again very soon. Sure, the pleasure is mine. You're watching Issues and Answers, a production of the Government Information Service. I'm your host, Jacques Kingston Compton, and thank you for watching.