Fifteen participants were awarded their Teachers Training Course Certificates as the Guyana Badminton Association successfully conducted the Shuttle Time Programme.
The main focus of the three- day event which was held from June 23rd to 25th at the National Gymnasium and the GOA Boardroom is to make badminton the most popular sport in schools globally.
Guyana is now the 106th country where the Shuttle Time Programme has been conducted.
The Guyana Badminton Association’s used this year’s Guyana Olympic Association Olympic Day series of activities to conduct the Shuttle Time Programme.
Receiving certificates were: Anson Ambrose-St. Roses High School, Abigail Alves-New Guyana School, Candyss Pauldon-Bishops High School, Cleon Critchlow-Jo-sel Private School, Nema Flue Bess-St. Joseph High School, Kevin Singh- Annandale Secondary School, Al Junior Wilson-Bladen Hall Multilateral School, Denise Stephan- Stewartville Primary School, Sarah Sylvester-Scott-School of the Nations, Priyanna Ramdhani-Marian Academy, Vanessa Shelto-GBA, Darrell Carpenay-GBA, Ravin Singh-GBA).
Meanwhile,(Narayan Ramdhani, Ambika Ramraj, Emelia Ramdhani and Marlon Chung all of the GBA, were awarded the Tutors Training Course Certificates at the conclusion of the course.
The three-day course, which opened on Friday morning at the Guyana Olympic Association boardroom, was conducted by Jamaican Richard Wong.
Wong, who is a BWF Shuttle Time Tutor and Coach, noted that the programme is not in-depth and is not structured to make the teachers coaches.
“We want to make the lessons fun, safe and have the kids experience success from the very beginning, and the Shuttle Time has been instrumental in that. The Shuttle Time Programme has been implemented in various countries across the Caribbean, and it actually helped in promoting the sport because it gets, as I said, teachers, P.E teachers or even regular teachers to teach a badminton lesson,” Wong explained.
“The programme is very simple; all the resources have been provided for the teachers so basically when a teacher takes a Shuttle Time course and decides to implement the programme all they have to do is go back to their school, look in the resources we give them free and just decide what lessons they want to teach,” Wong pointed out.
Participants of the shuttle programme with facilitator of the programme, Richard Wong and GBA President Gokarn Ramdhani
The target group is Primary and Secondary school teachers, and while the aim is to introduce children aged 5-15 to badminton, the programme can be adapted to any settings.
Shuttle Time is the first such programme to be hosted in Guyana, and it came to fruition following GBA President Gokarn Ramdhani making representation at the BWF’s AGM in Gold Coast, Australia, in May 2017.
“It’s going to be a very good course for Guyana, especially for the teachers training the children for CSEC. It is also a basic programme to help us with the development plan for badminton in Guyana because now the teachers will be assisting us to get up the players and then we get them out into the areas and the teams and clubs we would want them to go,” Ramdhani asserted. The Badminton Association, over the years, has been clamouring for the sport to be prominent in schools nationwide, and Ramdhani believes the hosting of the Shuttle Time Programme is a positive step in that direction.
“Because we’ve tried implementing badminton in a lot of schools for the past 7-8 years; we donated racquets, shuttlecocks and nets…we did programmes for them but nobody never followed up. So now that we get the P.E teachers, I hope this is a better way to get it more developed,” Ramdhani revealed.
The GBA would like to thank GOA, National Sports Commission (NSC), Banks DIH and Nicholas Fraser of the Ministry of Education.
