The Demerara Mutual Life Assurance Society (DMLAS) sponsored Rose Hall Town Youth and Sports Club, M.S (RHTY&SC, M.S) Cricket Development Programme bowled off recently at the Area ‘H’ Ground to a rousing start.
Senior Club Coach Delbert Hicks with assistance from Vice-President Mark Papannah successfully supervised over 60 youths in a three-hour session of physical exercise, fielding and pitch practice.
Club Secretary/CEO, Hilbert Foster, hailed the launching of the RHTY&SC/DMLAS Cricket Development Programme as a major step in making sure that the club maintains its status as one of Guyana’s leading cricket clubs.
The RHTY&SC, M.S has won the Guyana Cricket Club-of-the-Year Award five times – 2004, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2016 and has also won three national championships among 53 major titles since its formation in 1990 by three-times Commonwealth Youth Service Awardee, the St. Francis Community Developers.
The DMLAS programme runs up to the end of 2017 and Foster expressed confidence that it would be renewed for 2018 as the RHTY&SC, M.S intends to develop a fruitful relationship with the insurance company. Under the programme, DMLAS is standing the cost of a monthly stipend to the coach and providing balls and coaching equipment for the coaching seasons.
The long-serving Secretary/CEO stated that the main objectives of the programme are to make sure that every youth in the club fulfils his/her potential in cricket, to get them to understand their status as sports ambassadors and role models, to instil the virtue of personal discipline, to promote the importance of physical discipline, to promote the importance of physical fitness and to educate them on topics of importance to them.
The programme includes three days of pitch practice, along with fitness workouts, practice matches on selected weekends and classroom lectures to be conducted by senior club executives.
The topics to be covered include Drug Abuse, Personal Hygiene, Importance of Education, History of Cricket, Laws of Cricket, Structure of West Indies Cricket, Suicide and Depression among others. The RHTY&SC/DMLAS Programme would only involve members of the club, while the Annual Cricket Academy, which is to be held from July 11-21, would be opened to youths across Berbice.
