SASCOC president Gideon Sam said good progress has been made in taking South African sport forward but as always, there’s work to be done.
Sam was speaking after a two-day President’s Council meeting at Birchwood, Boksburg.
The meeting of the South African Olympic governing body was addressed by various key note speakers who provided input in various areas such as unity, transformation and representitivity.
“One of the most important areas is that of unity and it was good to see the engagement on these issues. Professor Denver Hendricks was very good in his input regarding this aspect.
“What’s obvious is that we have to have unity in sport if we are to success at any level. In fact we need unity in all aspects like social structure. Some say that its an economic reality and so on and it remains a dream to have perfect unity but its something that we have to continuously strive for.”
In terms of representivity Sam said: “It’s high time that we go into the various federations and just have a look at this subject but I must also stress that this is most definitely not a witchhunt of any sort.”
Sam says that SASCOC continues to work closely with the various federations under its umbrella.”We are getting them to take stock in terms of the process that we follow at SASCOC and that they also need to follow.”
“It’s most important that the federations must understand that we will take serious steps against people who are not up there with the plan. The federations by their very nature as members of SASCOC need to follow our programmes etc.”
Sam says that one of the areas that will be looked at closely continues to be school sport. “We need finality and get the educators involved. There’s the whole issue of funding, the usual Lotto and Sports Department but maybe we have to go back to the Lotto in areas of the funding criteria and as far as the Sports Department, maybe look at lessening the bureacracy.”
The subject of High Performance centres also came up for discussion. “Someone has to pay for this and the federations are buying in. We must perhaps target the Department of Finance in this regard because after all we are very serious about SA sport.
“All in all I think the spirit was very good and there is no doubt that we are making progress on many fronts. What happens next is that we will have a sports council meeting on 10-11 April where we will concretise decisions taken today.”
Article Source: http://www.sascoc.co.za/
