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By Neto Baptiste
Technical Director (TD) for the Antigua and Barbuda Football Association (ABFA) and former national player, Sowerby Gomes, has blamed the Covid-19 pandemic for a decline in participation in women’s football.
Speaking recently on the Good Morning Jojo Sports Show, Gomes said there was a noticeable uptick in both participation and spectatorship just prior to the mandatory shutting down of all sports in the country due to the global pandemic back in March of 2020.
“The heavy decline started with Covid and you had that cut-off [of sports] because [prior] there was a surge upward in female football just before Covid as a result of that; whereas we could find women now gravitating towards the schools and playing the game, they didn’t as they normally did before. As a result, we had to be creating programmes, organizing the games for the national teams, organizing youth training programmes in terms of the females but we didn’t have any more surges in terms of the development and the growth for female football across the country,” he said.
The Ministry of Sports had issued a 30-day island-wide suspension of all sports due to the pandemic in March 2020 as efforts were being made to avoid the spread of the virus.
Gomes said that, at the time, the league was flourishing under then head of the women’s programme Lisa Cole.
“The participation and attendance with the amount of teams that was taking part in the female competition we had running blew us out of the park, so we saw a growth that was taking place with female football across Antigua. We knew it was going down but we saw the resurgence of it that was happening here. I was not sitting in the position [back then] that I am sitting in now but I could attest to it,” the TD said.
The ABFA, last week, announced the planned staging of its Women’s Knockout Classic slated to kick off this Sunday and continue for two more weekends.
Eight teams, including reigning champions Lady Fort Road, will compete for top honours over the three aforementioned weekends. The other teams are Lady 5P’s Wadadli, Empire Trendsetters, Lady Masters, Cutting Edge FC, Young Warriors FC, Ottos Tigress and Wadadli United.
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