Minister for Youth Development & Sports Kenson Casimir has weighed in on the national netball team’s withdrawal from next month’s Netball World Cup Sydney 2027 Qualifier Americas in Barbados. At Monday’s pre-Cabinet press briefing, he reiterated the Netball Association’s request for more commercial support and pointed out that the government cannot cover all the costs of sports development on its own.
In an exclusive interview with St Lucia Times, Netball Saint Lucia president Sanya Antoine said the federation could not raise enough money to travel to Barbados and urged the business community to help more. Minister Casimir supported her call for more support.
“Getting sponsorship, getting financing for a particular sport really hinges on your ability to bring people out in support of the sport. Our challenge with netball is getting more commercial sector individuals, even the most ordinary Saint Lucian, to buy into netball,” he said.
“The work that we are going to be putting in is to see how we can commercialise netball even more, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, make netball even sexier for more sort of gravitation towards the actual financing from the private sector.”
The minister seems to be on the same page as the local federation’s executive. Antoine had said: “If you have somebody coming and investing in something, they would want to see what they’re getting out of it… it’s up toi us to build that product; that’s what we’re trying to do.”
The minister also said that government funding is not enough to cover all travel and participation costs. He noted that while this summer’s Central American & Caribbean (CAC) Games were organised by the Saint Lucia Olympic Committee, the government still helped fund the team, which won a historic bronze medal.
“The fact is, government will not be able to augment all the costs to a team travelling to all events that they desire,” Casimir said. “We did, through the National Lotteries, make a significant contribution towards them attending the CAC Games in Santo Domingo, where they did well.
“It would have been my desire if we could have identified the finances to provide every single one of them with the opportunity. But we really have not been able to identify a constant, consistent revenue stream that would allow us to provide all our national teams with their desired amount of financing.”
Casimir said his ministry is ready to work with national federations for sports like netball, basketball and volleyball to help them attract more commercial interest. He promised more financial support in the future, but repeated that some sports need a broader funding approach.
