The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas Volleyball Federation got a sigh of relief when they were informed that the third Cazovay Youth Girls Volleyball Championships was postponed.

The federation was scrapping to find the additional funding to send the team off to Trinidad & Tobago for the championships, originally scheduled for August 7-12. At the same time, they also had to secure funds for the senior men’s team to travel to French Saint Maarten for the second round of the World Qualifying tournament August 9-12.

On his return home with the junior boys from their bronze medal performance at the ninth Cazovay Junior Men’s Championship in Guadeloupe, federation president Joseph ‘Joe Mo’ Smith said the decision was made to postpone the girls tournament during a meeting with all of the memberships of NORCECA over the weekend.

“They wanted to cancel the boys’ part of the youth championship and just go with the girls because they didn’t have sufficient teams because everybody was concentrating on the junior championship that was going on,” Smith said. “Everybody said it was very expensive trying to mobilise teams around the Caribbean at this time.

“So most countries were not ready for it financially and already Martinique and Barbados had pulled out. So the president stepped in and made the decision to postpone the youth championship until December where they can give a lot of the countries a chance to prepare both the boys and the girls teams.”

Over the next few months, particularly with the opening of school, Smith said the federation will have an opportunity to engage more local players to be a part of the team. That will also give the federation time to prepare both teams to compete in the tournament.

“At this particularly time, only our girls team was prepared to go,” Smith said. “But now that the tournament has been moved to December, we can now concentrate on preparing both teams to compete. We all agreed during the meeting that we will work on sending both teams to compete at the same time and not have the tournament split up.”

Smith said it definitely was the right decision that was reached by all the participating countries and now the federation can focus on just getting the necessary funding for the men’s team to travel to the French Saint Maarten for the second round of the World Qualifying tournament next month.