Sam takes stock

SASCOC President Gideon Sam will host a two-day Presidents Council in Boksburg this weekend, 6-7 March.

The meeting, to be facilitated by Dr Willie Basson, will cover a wide range of topics, including transformation, performance in multisport international events, development and unification.

Speaking ahead of the Birchwood Hotel meeting, Sam said: “We’re going to be taking a fairly critical look at things  and trying to see if things started 10-15 years ago are coming to fruition or not. Perhaps we need to make more realistic promises rather than airy-fairy promises.

“For instance, did the unity process really succeed. As matters stand, probably 90% of the presidents at SASCOC are still white. Also if we were really serious about previous development structures the youngsters from years gone by would be right up there with the very best now.

“People may well say that its an issue of not enough funding, political interference, lack of structures and this meeting is all about looking each other in the eye and working things out.”

Sam went on to say that a variety of speakers will address the meeting. “We have a variety of people involved this weekend, all experts in their field and addressing the different issues like unity, transformation etc. I will lay out what we want to achieve by looking back and then looking ahead to as far as 2020.

“Perhaps people were too idealistic a while back, maybe instead of developing all nine provinces simultaneously we should have looked at three provinces and concentrated on them at first, stuff like that.

“After the outcome of these two days we plan on taking a roadshow to the various provinces to get further input. I think the realistic thing will be to look at the next five-year period. We constantly need to check ourselves and re-evaluate in any particular field whether it be coaching, administration or something else.”

Times for the meeting will be 10am-5.45pm on Saturday and 9am-1pm on Sunday.