Local Sports With Alie Sonta Kamara After the storm... SLJA heading for a new path The Sierra Leone Judo Association (SLJA) is hoping to find a new path after the deadly Ebola outbreak, which has caused its athletes huge frustration and loss of hope to progress. Winning hopes and getting back on track has been the latest drive of the Association’s Executive body whilst effort to support the Government in the fight against Ebola remains a core function for President Sensei Iddrissa Massaquoi. In the beginning of 2014, the Association continued with its usual training programmes conducted by Belgium Judo Expert Sapta with support from the International Judo Federation (IJF). It continued with its training of children to groom them up to cadet level. The primary purpose behind this is to get an organized judo team of children to compete in the next Cadet Championship for Junior Judokas in Rio. Early this year, the Association drew up a programme to support training camps every last three days of a month. The aim was to develop judokas in the Western Area. With support from the Association’s Executive body, it was going on successfully bringing together everybody under intensive workouts until the outbreak of Ebola. During the training camp programme, the Association’s National Coach, Sensei Leslie Smith, was able to identify young talents to build on the human resource sector of the game in Sierra Leone. The Association was able to prepare a team of judokas from a selected list of athletes at the camp to compete in the Commonwealth Games in Scotland August this year. It encountered frustration as only one of its two athletes competed against a foreign contender in a losing battle. In July, the Association was able to put together a structured team of six to compete in the African Judo Championship in Morocco, to see our Sierra Leonean contestants returning home with two medals – one gold, and one silver. This was the biggest achievement of the Association for its 2014 target line. The same selection of six judokas was to take part in the West African Judo Championship held in Ivory Coast in September this year but was barred from doing so due to the Ebola outbreak. This year alone, the Association was able to send its Assistant National Coach, Philip Omo Labi Decker, to Bo city to train trainers with the view of developing their skills. On account of that, a training camp was organized in Bo, which attracted hundreds of youths and children. That new move enabled the Association to establish another Children’s Judo Foundation in Bo. The Association was able to host a celebrated judo demonstration programme in Bo early this year with the aim of selling the game to the forces. However, due to lack of support from the Ministry of Sports, the Association missed out on several qualifiers, which may impede its chances of entering deal to participate in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. Speaking to Standard Sports last Saturday, the President of the Sierra Leone Judo Association, Sensei Iddrisa Massaquoi, expressed his disappointment on their failure to take their heavyweight Fredric Harris to Russia to compete in the IJF World Championship, which was a ranking and qualification for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. “It was due to Ebola,” he revealed. Locally, before the Ebola outbreak, the Association had had plans to develop six coaches, in which seminars would have been conducted. This was to be one among the biggest moves of the Association to involve PHE teachers and the Physical Health Education Department of the Ministry of Education. The rationale behind this was to introduce judo into the school curriculum under sports. The Association missed out on the opportunity to grab support from the Embassy of Japan in Ghana to organize local competitions. Like other sporting disciplines, the outbreak of Ebola has cost the Association a lot, beginning from losing chances to finance local programmes to develop judo among all facets of the youths to being deliberately barred from competing in cross-border tournaments.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 08:57:58 +0000
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