Parish leagues hampered by lack of sponsorship

VETERAN LOCAL umpire Sylvester Campbell said Netball Jamaica needs to find ways of attracting more sponsors for its parish netball league competitions.

The parish leagues were staged for the first time this year, but the outspoken Campbell said while it is good for the growth and development of the sport, the lack of the sponsorship affected its overall attraction.

“The all-island league must be the way to go. But because we were having it for the first year, it had a bit of challenges in it,” said Campbell.

“Part of the problem seems to be the sponsorship. The monetary part of it seems to be a big problem because we need to look at what we need to do different to earn money to be able to move the teams around,” he said.

“I think Netball Jamaica provided transportation, but it was pretty expensive when they had to do it,” Campbell said.

He added: “To go back to the previous club system, netball is not Kingston and St Andrew, netball is Jamaica. So we need to find ways to get the entire island to play, which must be a good way, but we just need to look at where the shortfall is and try to fix it.”

TEAMS FORCED TO WITHDRAW

Many of the teams in this year’s competition were forced to withdraw because of difficulty affording transportation from their team base in various parishes to the match venue at the Leila Robinson Courts in Kingston.

Roy Pryce, a member of the organising committee of the Parish Leagues, admitted that there were challenges with the leagues due to the limited amount of sponsorship that Netball Jamaica was able to acquire to run the competitions.

“We had a few challenges especially when it comes to transportation because some of the other sponsors that we were expecting to come on board didn’t come on board, so we had a shortfall there,” said Pryce.

“I think we tried our best to run the leagues successfully and believe that for most part, we did achieve some of our goals,” he said.

Pryce added: “Some of the teams that dropped out of games were not dropping out because they had an issue with the competition, most of them were dropping out as a result of their poor organisation and Netball Jamaica didn’t have the time to go into these parishes and organise them.”

The competition went ahead with JN Bank as its sole sponsor.