Lack of commitment has cost 21 junior athletes a chance to represent Malawi at next year\u2019s African Union Sports Council (AUSC) Region Five Games in Angola.<\/p>\n
The athletes were dropped from the ongoing Podium Performance Programme (PPP) which the College of Medicine Sports Complex High Performance Centre (HPC) is hosting.<\/p>\n
Malawi National Council of Sports partnered the HPC through College of Medicine Sports Complex to roll out the pilot project ahead of the Region Five Games set for next December.<\/p>\n
The programme aims at improving the performance of local athletes to achieve podium results by winning medals.<\/p>\n
The trial project has attracted athletes from four sport codes; tennis, judo, boxing and athletics. The athletes were selected through their respective associations.<\/p>\n
Initially, 58 athletes from different sporting codes were selected in Blantyre for the trial project, but 21 were dropped while 37 remain in camp.<\/p>\n
HPC director, Augustine \u2018Gus\u2019 Banda Jnr., confirmed that 21 athletes were expelled from the programme due to lack of commitment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a trial project and we need to follow whatever we put in place to achieve our desired goals. To us it is not how many athletes we take for the games, but the quality of training. Again, it is not the quantity of training but the quality as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had to drop those ones because they were not committed. According to our training programme, they cannot catch up. Remember this is sports science where you need to follow the programme religiously.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe initially took 58 athletes with a target of taking 30. Currently, we are offering different services to them such as biomechanics, video analysis, medical screening, physiotherapy, fitness testing, conditioning, gym and internal competitions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Sports Council\u2019s administration manager, Henry Mereka, said they were following the programme with keen interest.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t interfere with their decisions because they are the experts in that field,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Boxing coach Andy Muyaya admitted that his charges were exposed to scientific training.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course, as a coach I am also concentrating on different aspects including techniques. I have left the physical and scientific part in the hands of the HPC instructors,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lack of commitment has cost 21 junior athletes a chance to represent Malawi at next year\u2019s African Union Sports Council (AUSC) Region Five Games in Angola. The athletes were dropped from the ongoing Podium Performance Programme (PPP) which the College of Medicine Sports Complex High Performance Centre (HPC) is hosting. Malawi National Council of Sports […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7908,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7903\/revisions\/7908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}