The Guyana Football Federation (GFF) has launched a nationwide Referee Recruitment Campaign under the theme #GetInvolved. The initiative seeks to expand the existing pool of male and female match officials.
The official launch was done on a Virtual platform on Tuesday morning where President of the Federation Wayne Forde, Technical Director Ian Greenwood and Head of the Referees Department Dion Inniss delivered remarks.
Dion Inniss, Head of Referees Department: “So the reasons why we’re recruiting are simple. We need to grow. We have our referees that have dedicated their time and energies over the years to ensure that the game is officiated properly, however, there must be a time when we need new blood, new younger, more energetic legs into the referees programme, and there is no better time to do that than now. You may say while 16-25 (age group); it’s simple too. The reasons are that we’re going to be investing quite a bit of energy, time and resources into training young men and women from throughout Guyana and we want those persons to give at least 15 years of service, not only to Guyana, but who knows maybe the Caribbean or even a FIFA World Cup match. So Get Involved!”
Ian Greenwood, Technical Director- GFF: “The Get Involved campaign is vitally important for the continued development of football in Guyana. Over the past few years we’ve seen some tremendous success with our junior national teams and our senior national teams, both male and female. But to have continued success we have to ensure the environment our players are operating in is one of a professional standard. So we’re working with all our competitions- Under-13, 15, 17, male and female- we need to ensure that environment has top-class referees at every single age group. This campaign to recruit more referees is a fantastic part of our development process. I must stress we really want to focus on female referees as well. As we’ve seen in the football world at the moment, Women’s football is something that is top of the agenda for FIFA and also Concacaf, and the Guyana Football Federation will be investing a lot into infrastructure, coaches development, referees development and clubs development for our female players.”
Wayne Forde, President- GFF: “One of the key areas of emphasis over the past five to six years at FIFA has been participation. While there are particular areas of football development that receives tremendous funding and technical development, FIFA has strongly emphasised the need for wide and broad participation. We want to see as many human beings on this planet being involved in football in some way, and the Get Involved campaign allows us to broaden the amount of participants that we have in the officiating end of the game.”
