In 2017, an international Sports Company called SRHD Sports Management Limited officially introduced the sport of Curling to Nigeria.
The CEO of SRHD Sports Management Limited, Mr. Demola Daniel who doubles as the first ever and incumbent president of the Nigerian Curling Federation gives an insight on how the sport of Curling can be the biggest Sport in Nigeria.
Mr. Daniel believes that human capacity building and development in terms of discovery of talents and exposure of Nigerian curlers to international tournaments is important to promote the ice sport in Nigeria and Africa at large.
On the grooming of athletes, Mr Daniel said, “We have been doing so well because we have been organizing so many training clinics in Nigeria.”
“We teach the young ones how to curl using dry curling sheets with the help of my colleagues who are in the federation like T. J. Cole, Kennedy, Esther, Harold Woods, Chris Naimet, Carol, Charles Naimet and not forgetting the then Director of Operations, Mr. Samuel Ewot as we all come together to organise the clinics.”
“We have been faring so well in promoting the sport but it has not been easy for us as we are doing all we can to make sure the sport of Curling continues to grow in Nigeria.”
Mr Daniel explained that on talent discovery of curlers in Nigeria started when the sport was officially played in Nigeria, the federation started reaching out to all Nigerians in the diaspora (America, Europe and Asia).
He said,”We started to harness the talents with the diaspora Nigerians because of the availability of the training ground (Ice) overseas and you are seeing the results as we play all kinds of games winning and learning as well.”
“Coming back home (Nigeria) in the talent discovery, we were able to discover so many Youths and kids under 15 years in the clinic. The talents we are about taking out to compete for the country are female curlers and are four in number. They include Aniogbu Amarachi, Halimat Buhari and two Rivers State born, Port Harcourt based curlers named Ibiso Warmate and Deborah Alasebieton.
“These four female curlers will represent Nigeria in the Pacific-Asia Curling Championship to be hosted in Wakkanai, Japan from 31st October, 2020 to 13th November, 2020.”
Furthermore, Mr. Daniel affirmed by saying that, “In terms of training the locals (Nigerians), we(Nigerian Curling Federation) signed an Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) partnership with countries like Italy, South Korea, USA and Turkey who voluntarily opened their facilities for our discovered talents from Nigeria to train pending when our facility is built.”
“Due to CONVID-19 issue, we were supposed to take our under 15 kids out to Canada, Italy and USA to train but it was not possible.”
Comments are closed.