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Grace Chingoma Senior Sports Reporter

THE Baldmin Foundation is set to transform sport in the country through their annual educational scholarships to the United States.

Annually between five to 10 talented athletes are benefitting from the package that is funded to the tune of US$250 000 to US$300 000 per year.

Interestingly, the foundation, that is catered for through their firm Baldmin Holdings, has made it a priority that 60 to 70 percent of students who benefit from the package annually must be girls.

So far a number of athletes have benefited from this fund and are currently studying at different universities around the United States.

NJCAA Division I Cross County Female Athlete of the Year, Faith Nyathi, and Bradley Makuvire, who has won Southland Male Cross Country Athlete of the Week several times, are some of the recipients that are doing well abroad.

Baldmin Holdings managing director, Costar Takawira, recently told The Herald their target was junior athletes, with a strong bias on women.

“Every year we send a minimum of five to 10 athletes on fully funded scholarships to the United States.

“We normally want to work with juniors mainly, then we consider the other senior guys, but our target is between 17 to 24 years’ maximum, girls and boys.

“Besides that we focus mainly on the previously disadvantaged kids and our foundation also focuses on the girl child. We saw that the girl child was disadvantaged, especially in Africa. When we look at sport no one considers the girl child.

“So we give 60 to 70 percent to the girls and the remainder normally is for the boys. Unless that year we don’t have many girls that’s when we end up putting more boys than girls and this (scholarship programme) usually is valid between US$250 000 to US$300 000 a year,” said Takawira.

“Recently we sent another athlete who got about US$35 000 plus.

“It is a full scholarship. They don’t pay anything; we pay for the airfares as well. When they get to the United States we have some partners and friends, former athletes and former colleagues who help us in receiving the athletes.

“The first week they are in the United States their welfare is taken care of. So far no one has complained. We try our best, and we say give us the child and we take care of him or her,” Takawira said.

The scholarships are administered through the National Athletics Association of Zimbabwe.

“It is an open book. We don’t handle anything and I want everyone to understand we just facilitate.

“We would like to thank NAAZ for giving us the opportunity to work with them.” Over and above the abroad scholarships, the foundation has also paid fees for local students.

“We have assisted a lot of students, one recently graduated in South Africa and was studying law. We have two students at Allan Wilson High School who we have been paying fees for since Form 1 and are now doing Form 4.

“We pay fees for students doing A Levels in Norton and about 10 students have benefited from our USA scholarships to date.

“We are looking at sending about four more athletes this year in August,” Takawira said.

Takawira added that his aim was also to make the Junior Championships, that they have been sponsoring since last year, a big international event.

“We try our best to make events a success.

“The Junior Championships, we want to make it an international event.

“I have been talking to one of the former athletes and we want to invite some athletes, top athletes from High Schools in the United States.

“We are busy engaging some of the coaches, if things go well they will grace our events this year so that it gives our guys more competition and improves our times and we have better athletes for the Olympics,” said Takawira.

Meanwhile, NAAZ have taken innovation a gear up and would be offering online lessons for international Level One coaching courses.

This innovation will ensure the association would be able to produce more coaches through this methodology.

NAAZ president Tendai Tagara said they will conduct their trial run with a total of 20 coaches. The programme would be sent to World Athletics for monitoring.

“We want to register 20 coaches whom we are going to send to World Athletics for the first trial monitored program.

“The coaches will do their theory online and sit for their theory online. The association is going to monitor the practical aspect,” said Tagara.

The veteran administrator said they will be putting in mechanisms to guard against the training of desktop coaches.

“We want to make it very clear that we don’t want to produce an online/internet coach. We want to produce a practical coach who is not afraid to take the challenge.

“You know that the Level One course usually entails 12 days of physical contact.  “Now we are sending our coaches online.   “After three weeks of online learning, we will request the World board to ask them to sit for theory.

“During this period we want them to have at least an athlete who they will be working with and report to the lecturers.

“As a federation, we will have three days of physical contact so that we assist and analyse their conduct of a physical session, planning and execution.

“When we are satisfied we will then send the results to World Athletics for certification.

“It is the practical part in which we will be tough so that we don’t have paper coaches.

“We believe e-learning will produce more coaches’ in schools.

“Our target is to produce more qualified coaches for the school system,” he said.

However, Tagara said their challenge is for the coaches’ who are based in rural areas

“We are concerned with our rural coaches who do not have access to the internet and access to other IT gadgets.

“But we are working out to make sure once or twice a year we have a new format of physical course for Level One,” said Tagara.