Former Champion Urges Proper Management Of School Sports

A former Commonwealth long jump champion, Yusuf Alli, has urged proper management of school sports to enable adequate exposure of young talents for excellence.

Alli told newsmen in Lagos that school sports remained the bedrock of Nigeria’s sports development.

He urged that talents discovered from school sports should be nurtured through sustainable programmes.

“When I went to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, I was still a student.

“We need to show more interest in what happens in our schools; we should make school sports as competitive as they used to be,’’ he said.

He said that discovering and developing talents through school sports would make it difficult for players to falsify their ages.

Alli also urged mentoring of budding talents by exposed ones to help the young ones to make careers in sports.

He urged the National Sports Commission to come up with a long-term sports development plan for Nigeria.

“We should have a pyramidal structure, whereby a distilling process is adopted to pick out the very best talents from the thousands invited for various competitions,’’ he advised.