Teachers upgrade badminton skills during vacation

The technical director of the TTBA Melvin Thomas, held an 18-contact hour certification course which ran from July 25-27.

Thomas has almost 30 years of coaching experience and has been part of the national coaching set-up since 1987.

A total of 30 teachers from 24 schools representing all seven education districts in Trinidad met at the El Dorado East Secondary School to participate in certification courses.

At the conclusion of the three-day programme, teachers received National Level One certification which is recognised by the Ministry of Education, Shuttle Time Teacher certification, a Badminton World Federation (BWF) concept for imparting badminton skills to young athletes, and finally the Physical Literacy Teacher programme.

Thomas explained that the latter is part of the Long Term Athlete Development programme (LTAD) initiative adopted by the TT Olympic Committee (TTOC) and Caribbean Association of National Olympic Committees (CANOC).

The technical director for the TTBA explained that this initiative, which teaches basic sport specific skills, creates a pool from which potential athletes can be drawn for the various sporting disciplines in TT.

He concluded that these programmes better equipped individuals to become involved with sport at a national level, hence its relevance to the LTAD programme.

The TTSSBA is relaunching its Secondary school competition in October. This course was one of the critical aspects to ensuring that each school has a viable badminton programme, which would be facilitated by trained PE teachers equipped to teach the necessary skill sets to the students. This would guarantee that as many schools as possible could participate in the competition.

The organisation, in conjunction with the TTBA, wants to ensure that badminton is thriving at the grassroots level, thus increasing the pool of available players to filter to the national level.