SPOTLIGHT ON SPORT: Water Day!

The event saw children utilise water pumps, water balloons, water buckets, water slide maps, soap, inflatable pools and not to mention a lot of water.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Summer Sports and Leisure Programme, with the organisers and managers ecstatic about how many people have come, and how many smiles there were on the children’s faces.

Attending the event was Minister of Sport, Steven Linares, who spoke to PANORAMA about the event, saying:

“Firstly, it’s the 20th year of the summer sports, and it went from a very small attendance at the very beginning where only a handful of children used to come to this, you can see now that we are getting nearly 200 children or even up to 300 per day coming to the summer sports. The summer sports has grown immensely, why? Because the children have a lot of fun. It’s a way to introduce children into sports using the concept of fun.”

The aim of the summer sports is to encourage children to get involved in sports. Many associations have been involved, including football, basketball, target shooting associations amongst others the past few weeks, providing older children the opportunity to try out the sports. The Water Day is to help train the young children’s hand-eye co-ordination to perhaps further go into other sports that the children might be interested in in the future.

Mr Linares continued by saying, “This year is much busier, it’s been growing from year one, this year we have had many many more children than we had last year, but what is very very encouraging and has been something of great satisfaction is the Stay and Play. The Stay and Play are children with disabilities that they come here during the summer and they do a lot of sports, a lot of exercise and a lot of educational programmes. Parents at the very beginning were a bit reluctant to send children to the summer Stay and Play, and now we are getting I think around 95% of the children who have some sort of disability coming here and enjoying themselves for the whole of the summer.”

He added, “3 years ago we did an extension to the stay and play area, we used to work in a boathouse and now they have their own facility, and we are hoping to extend that even further because it’s grown so much.”

A GSLA worker spoke to PANORAMA saying, “This is by far my favourite day of the Summer Sports. Seeing everybody so happy and having so much fun is amazing and it’s a privilege to be involved.”

27-08-2019 PANORAMAdailyGIBRALTAR