BELIZE CITY, Sun. Feb. 13. 2022– About a month ago, the sports portfolio of Hon. Kevin Bernard was reassigned to to Hon. Rodwell Ferguson after Hon. Bernard became the new Minister of Health and Wellness. Since then, Hon. Ferguson has been making an assessment of local sporting facilities as the country nears a possible resumption of social activities following what is projected to be an imminent end of the most recent Covid-19 wave. Last week, on Thursday, February 10, Minister Ferguson and his team went to the Orange Walk District to assess the sporting facilities in that locality.
During his visit, Minister Ferguson announced that sports activities will be resuming in the country within the next three weeks—with basketball games being the first of such activities to be taking place publicly. “With the limited resources, we have agreed that within the next three weeks we are going to start basketball competitions across the country at high levels, in all districts, in all communities if possible, cause we must reach out to our young people,” he said.
Hon. Ferguson further explained, “We have a management meeting every Monday, and we all sit down together and plan, and together we have seen major strides and some major accomplishments. We are going to start with basketball within a couple of weeks and across the country of Belize, where everybody will have the opportunity to play basketball. Football is in a certain standard, because we have the FFB and we also plan to work with volleyball to reach out to every youth across the country. So it’s a tremendous task.”
Minister Ferguson went on to express his belief that in order to reduce crimes and violence in the country, young people must be involved in sports.
“I strongly believe that we can curve the crime situation in this country by first instilling our youths, promoting sports, and while we’re promoting sports, we have to find opportunities for them to be employed. But once you occupy them in sports, we’re going to see a complete difference,” he said.
During the minister’s visit, he donated several pieces of sporting equipment to the Orange Walk Sports Council.