Stanley Nkwazema

facilities required in one centre.

Commitment and cooperation As a board, we are one and we work together. We were appointed as a team and very soon we will set up the sub committees of the board to take care of different major areas of need. It is not a one man affair. We shall be sharing the responsibilities and get some people from outside the board to help us in the areas that we need to work on four key areas like tournaments, marketing, grassroots and sponsorship. From the government side, we have not got any subvention or fund from the Ministry of Youth and Sports, we made applications a couple of times and the general response was that there are no funds. That is why we are looking out and trying to source funding from other sources. Some we can generate ourselves like the hostel facilities. If we are able to build it very soon, I know that other federations have programmes regularly and generally require hostels and we could be leasing it out to them and earn some money which we can put into other programmes.

Keying into ITF programmes We are working with the international body, but we have realised that there are raw programmes at the grassroots level we can design on our own different from what the ITF has. A couple of coaches here are very experienced and we can work with them and some are already doing things. In some you don’t need a tennis court but a little space and just start teaching the basics. The first thing is to raise the interest in the game from age 6, introduce the game, show some video and let people start to know. If you go everywhere you see football pitches in one corner. They are not major pitches. We can improvise as there are coaches that run such programmes and we can run with them.

We expect better days ahead We are very expectant. We are very positive that it will happen but it will take some time .We have few kids of ours that have been opportune to get some sponsors in Nigeria to go abroad. We have a couple of them in some academies in the U.S. majorly and they are doing very well. Hopefully we may get some very good results from them. We have them in IMG, a tennis academy in Florida. We have Sylvester Emmanuel that was in Spain and playing Futures all around. He played in Abuja, in Uganda, Zimbabwe. He will be moving to Ibadan where they will be camping for two weeks before they go to Kenya to play the Davis Cup.

Low activity in the scholarship scheme

Before now, if you check properly, there was one particular man, he is late now but loved the game so much and was blessed too financially. He actually put out a lot of his personal resources into tennis. After he passed, there has not been any major person in that kind of category and with such interest in the game that could see a lot of Nigerians moving to schools and academies abroad. That is what we are trying to do. We are republishing the game and pre-announcing it so that when people know that this game is there and should be encouraged and we hope that we should be able to improve our position in the world. But for now, if that does not happen, we can equally play the tennis in Nigeria when we have an academy. It is cheaper to run academies in Nigeria, and we can bring in qualified professionals, the coaches, some could be trained here, some could go abroad and come back to impact such knowledge on the kids here.