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City Sports School to increase reach to 5000 students and continue to improve lives through sports in 2023.
City Sports Group continues to pull their weight in Nigerian sports development at the grassroots level with big plans for the new year.
The organisation’s stakeholders revealed big plans to continue impacting young Nigerians through sports.
City Sports Group CEO, Shola Opaleye, head of the football development program, Bamidele Nurudeen, school administrator, Judith Nwachukwu, Global Sports Program coordinator, Linus Usiholo and Ugochi Onyewueyi, the pathway and performance coordinator were all in attendance at a press conference to shed light on how specifically the organisation will help young athletes in 2023.
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City Sports outlines plans for the new year
CEO of City Sports Group, Shola Opaleye had this to say about the plans for 2023:
“We are very busy, we have many activities and all our activities are basically towards developing young people. The first thing we’ll be doing in 2023, we will open up our centres, about seven centres across Lagos alone for now to all our students who will come in to participate in football, swimming, basketball and athletics,” he said.
Opaleye continued, “These students will be between the ages of 12 and 19, we have coaches that handle their development throughout the year, they will also be put into the City Sports League which is an internal competition set up by us to test the skills, behaviours and characters of our students.”
“We also have what we call the Global Sports Program, every year we send students abroad to compete and to play football, swimming, basketball and athletics to expose them to the other side. Every year we travel about three, four times but for the first time, this year we’re travelling about six times,” the CEO added.
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Opaleye revealed a new addition to the City Sports repertoire called the Pathway Program:
“There’s a pathway program as well, with two options, either you go and sign a pro contract with an organisation or a club outside this country or you can get a scholarship to a university abroad. Our job in the pathway program is to ensure that we get every student either to sign a pro contract or to get a scholarship,” he said.
“We have a sustainability agenda which we call sports social responsibility, there are many boys and girls who would probably not come to City Sports because they can’t afford it or we’re not in their centre or one reason or another, this year we have an objective to set up eight community centres for boys and girls in parts of Lagos to also benefit from all of this free of charge.
That is eight community centres for 2023, two centres every quarter, each centre will have about 85 students or thereabout so when we add our eight centres, that’s about 700 students for the year that we’re going to be working on developing them and they to stand a chance of getting these benefits,” Opaleye rounded up.
City Sports’ new Pathway Program
Ugochi Onyewueyi, the pathway and performance coordinator explained how the Pathway Program works and how exactly it will impact young Nigerians:
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“City Sports agency will focus on institutional processes of helping student-athletes earn college credit through sports development programs which can be in turn changed to partial or full-ride scholarships for the students,” she said.
“So basically, after you develop yourself through the league, develop yourself through the global sports program, you go through the educational processes, we then, in turn, help you turn those college credits which you have gotten from here into partial or full-ride scholarships in our partner universities across the world,” Ugochi continued.
She further explained, “we offer the gap-year structure, we offer college credits, we offer partial and full-ride scholarships, we offer internships and competitions which in turn will help you become the right student-athlete that partner universities across the world are searching for.
From the ages 12 to 19, you want to go abroad and go play, you want to become a professional in the sports industry, whatever you choose to be, we prepare a pathway to help you achieve those goals through our scholarship program, through our model, through our gap-year structure.”
“We help only to facilitate your pathway by creating models that are globally acclaimed and globally recognised in line with our partner universities,” she concluded.
City Sport’s Global Sports Program
Linus Usiholo who is City Sports Group’s global sports program coordinator was also available to shed light on the program and how it works:
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“The Global Sports Program is actually split into two parts; the tours and competitions,” Linus began, clarifying the nuances and processes of the program.
“The tours is going to iconic sports venues, that’s what we do for these young kids, going to iconic sports venues, training with athletes and kids in their age category. We also have competitions as well which is mandatory that we go to,” he continued.
“We’re looking forward to a trip in April, by January pretty much everything is wrapped up already, the academic session has resumed regardless of the strike. Over the years we’ve done bunch of trips, we have gone to Portugal, Manchester City, Burnley, West Ham and the London academy. We’re not just doing football, we’re developing four sporting disciplines, athletics, swimming and Basketball and we’ll be going to the London Lions as well to develop our students’ leadership and basketball abilities,” Linus continued.
“It’s not just Europe as well, we’re going to Asia, we’re going to the Middle East, we just had the World Cup in Qatar as well, we’re going to Dubai, potentially South Africa maybe sometime in the year, that’s the Global Sports Program in a nutshell.”
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