“Turning point for us” – Ramson as sports seminar opens

In excess of 350 athletes and administrators were registered on Thursday to participate in a sports seminar, facilitated by the Global Super League (GSL) and Australia’s Deakin University as the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports (MCYS) seeks to develop capacity within the sector.
The two-day sports seminar took centre stage at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC), Liliendaal, on Thursday morning, where a simple opening ceremony preceded the workshop sessions.
The seminar forms part of efforts from the GSL: Super We initiatives this year to involve and offer opportunities within the tournament’s running to Guyanese youths and professionals.
Detailing the vision behind the seminar was GSL Director Jamie Stewart.
Stewart explained, “The vision for the event was to create a globally significant sports event that was made in Guyana and operated by Guyana, projecting out to the world. I would say in the first couple of years, we were really focused on establishing the global credibility of the event amongst the cricket community. Word of mouth travels very fast in the cricket world, so we worked very hard to give the teams the security and comfort that coming to Guyana and playing in this tournament was going to be an amazing experience. Our thinking was, we started to turn a little bit more in with the idea of ‘What can this event do for Guyana? What sort of legacy can it leave? How do we create a situation where knowledge transfer happens with the local sports ecosystem?’ That’s where the idea for this workshop came about,” the GSL director went on to add.
Delivering feature remarks was Sport Minister Charles Ramson Jr, who explained that his Ministry is now in the process of focusing on human capacity development.
“We have had moments and examples of brilliance, of world-class talent, but they have been many areas where we have not shown the world how powerful or how great our talent is.” The sport Minister shared, “It exists; I believe in it, but to do it, we all have to row in the same direction. We all have to raise our game, governance structure, performance, standards, and everything that we do in relation to our function; we have to do it in the best possible way so that we can unlock that potential.”
Ramson asserted, “It’s a great day today; today is a turning point for us. It will always be remembered that this is a turning point for us with this shift in focus as we’re moving into a phase of development of sports administration and organisation.”
Operating along a similar train of thought was the Minister within the sport Ministry, Steven Jacobs, who revealed that certification and qualifications are next on the Ministry’s agenda.
Jacobs revealed, “We are pushing and working for sports programmes, which we’ll launch in the coming weeks through the GOAL programme, which has been a successful programme with over 38,000 graduates. We will now move the sports programmes through certificates and also master’s degrees.”
“But we’re going to launch those programmes because we see them as key and vital also,” the cricketer-turned-politician added.
One of the programme’s facilitators, Campbell Jamieson, later detailed the seminar’s main focus areas.
“The four focus points for today are obviously building an ecosystem for sport within Guyana; we’re also going to look at governance models, not just models we’ve used in Australia; we’ll also take a look at models we’ve used in Singapore, England, and India. We’ll also look at how we develop a workforce and the resources you need to deliver on the objective the Government has,” Jamieson highlighted.
The Deakin University professor continued, “Finally, tomorrow, we’ll look at sport tourism. Not just from an elite-level, major-event perspective, we’ll look at tourism from a community-development and how-tourism-is-generated-and-derived-from-grassroots perspective, all the way through to the elite level.”