NASSAU, The Bahamas – Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture the Hon. Charles Maynard said the Government’s partnership with Atlantis Resort yielded needed repairs and upgrades to the Kendal Isaacs Gymnasium.
“Atlantis has always been a good partner with the Government, in terms of assisting us with sports programmes throughout the country and, lately, Atlantis has dived into sports tourism on their own; so I am sure we could look forward to a wonderful partnership with our Ministry and the Ministry of Tourism’s Sports Unit to work with Atlantis to continue to bring big events to the country,” Minister Maynard said, on December 20, 2010.
Minister Maynard was on a tour of the gymnasium with senior ministry officials and Senior Vice President of Public Affairs at Kerzner Bahamas Ed Fields.
“We are very impressed,” Minister Maynard said of the upgrades.
“They were very necessary.”
Minister Maynard added that the gymnasium is currently the location for the Bahamas Sunshine Shootout, a major international women’s collegiate basketball tournament (December 18-22), and his ministry wanted to ensure that the facility was “top class”.
“There is still more work to be done, obviously, but we dealt with a number of the necessary things in order to make it comfortable for the teams,” Minister Maynard said.
“The Ministry will continue in the upgrades,” Minister Maynard said.
“We have a checklist of things that we are looking at and we are going to deal with those issues, over the course of time.
“One of our biggest issues is that the gym is always in use; so we do not have the downtime to do some of the necessary repairs; but we will continue to work on it.” Mr. Fields said Atlantis has always been involved with any community service they could support and lately they have been “deeply” involved with basketball.
“We have been speaking with the Bahamas Basketball Federation, in terms of their partnership with us and the Ministries of Sports and Tourism in regard of our Battle in Atlantis (Division 1 Men’s Collegiate Basketball Tournament),” Mr. Fields said.
Regarding the upgrades, Mr. Fields added: “It’s an easy fix. These things are relatively viable, in terms of assistance. What we would like to see is a sustainable type of thing where you do not come in and just do the kind of quick fix; but you get the facilities up to standard – and our whole product is about standards – and then you maintain that standard.
“I have offered the Minister any assistance we can give in terms of training, with regards to maintenance regiments, because a lot of what we see in terms of having to fix things are really due to a lack of scheduled, consistent preventive maintenance,” Mr. Fields said.
“If we can assist in that regard, we will assist in that regard.” Minister Maynard encouraged more corporate sector members to partner with the ministry in such projects.
“Get involved with what we are doing at the ministry,” he said to possible corporate sponsors.
“We have a lot of activities that we do for the betterment of young people and any assistance that they could render would be greatly appreciated.”
By ERIC ROSE
Bahamas Information Services
