We need to play again – Adams

Featured Speaker at last Friday’s Awards and Presentation Ceremony of the St Vincent and the Grenadines Football Federation Dr Lennox Adams has given the prescription if St Vincent and the Grenadines wants to produce more sportsmen and women.{{more}}

As he addressed a packed hall at Frenches House, Adams, a former national athlete and track and field administrator, frequently injected his speech with the statement: “We need to play again.”

“It is clear that enough of our young people are not playing anymore and this is going to have a negative impact on the talent pool available for selection to our national teams whether it be cricket, football, basketball or track and field,” he said.

Drawing parallels between what obtained in the 1980s and 1990s, Adams related personal experiences.

“We, in Stubbs, played a lot and when we did, we produced. And we not only produced, we produced over 20 cricketers who represented St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Windwards and the West Indies at various levels …But conversely, when we stopped playing, we stopped producing. So, there was a correlation between playing and producing,” he proffered.

“It was a similar thing with that excellent community of Sion Hill, which was a force to be reckoned with in many sports and produced some good sportsmen and women, but when they stopped playing, they stopped winning and they, therefore, must also return to playing.”

Adams noted that today many parents are restricting their children’s active lifestyle of play.

“Our children are learning that sweating is bad and nasty… Instead of allowing natural play to take place, we seem to be gravitating to the place where we are trying to create sterile, quiet environments, so that we as adults can have quiet time and can concentrate on our work, so the child suffers,” Adams diagnosed.

The featured speaker said as a consequence, “The child never learns to play; the child never learns to resolve conflicts.”

Whilst not attributing the deviant behaviours among the young people directly to the lack of play, Adams rhetorically asked, “If our children are not out there on the field, in the back-yard, down the road, down the lane playing, what are they doing?”

As part of his remedy package, Adams said he would like to see that all playing fields around St Vincent and the Grenadines be filled with youngsters during the long July/August vacation involved in some sporting activities.

His recommendation came as an antidote to the present trends of socialization, claiming, “With so many young people sitting idly this summer, sitting in front of the television, playing video games, watching programmes, watching stuff beamed to us out of the North American market, which in some cases have no relevance to us.”

He said oftentimes children are given cell phones to play with, which become “the de facto parents.”

Adams, whose oratory was well received on the night, said outside of his medical practice, he gets firsthand knowledge of the goings-on of sports in St Vincent and the Grenadines, as he is also a sports photo journalist.(RT)