Kagua-Erave students to be exposed to football programme

Students in Kagua-Erave, Southern Highlands, will be exposed to a specifically tailored football programme aimed at providing a solid foundation geared towards making them future soccer players.
This is an initiative of the Kagua-Erave MP Wesley Raminai.
Raminai will launch the district soccer nursery programme in Kagua on Sunday and it will be delivered in Erave a week later.
“It seems like an ambitious programme, but we are adopting the rationale that we aim for the stars and if we land on the moon we would have still achieved big things,” Raminai said.
A former soccer player himself, Raminai said the programme was aimed at producing young players who would be introduced to systems in the European Football League or similar competitions with long-term objective of developing them into professional footballers.
“We are introducing a football nursery which forms part of the pathway for our youngsters. Papua New Guineans are naturally gifted but unless we introduce these young players to similar systems that most world-class players globally are exposed to, we are not providing them the opportunity to realise their true potential,” Raminai said.
He said Papua New Guineans were exposed to sports much later compared to youngsters in other highly successful sporting nations.
“Therefore, when our players move to what we consider our elite level, most countries are more advanced in comparison in their skill level and knowledge of the game because they start at a much earlier age than us,” he said.
“This becomes a distinct disadvantage to us and many people well-versed with the principles of sports will agree with me. So I have decided to introduce this programme to my district with the hope of rolling it out to other parts of the country.”
Raminai said this was a district-oriented programme he envisaged well before he entered politics but has now adopted it as part of his development initiatives for Kagua-Erave following his election.