Earlier this month, I was pleased to spend time in Cairo, Egypt to attend the first-ever Afro Arab Sitting Volleyball Club Championship. The tournament was the result of a strong collaboration between the Egyptian Minister of Youth and Sport, Dr. Ashraf Sobhi, and Ehab Hassanein, President of ParaVolley Africa (PVA) and the Arab Federation for Sports with Disabilities, with the generous support of Dr. Fahd Al-Faquir, the head of the PVA’s Arab Sitting Volleyball Committee and the event’s key sponsor. I enjoyed meeting the athletes from 12 men’s teams that gathered in Cairo for the competition. There were a few familiar faces playing on different teams, and many, many new athletes to meet and watch.
During my week in Cairo, I was joined for the first few days by my colleague and fellow World ParaVolley Board Member, Anton Raimondo, a Paralympian and President of ParaVolley South Africa who serves on the WPV Board as the Development Director. Anton and I focused our days together on discussions to establish more WPV education within the region, including collaboration with coaches, classifiers, technical officials, and administrators. We met with Dr. Kareem Hassan Hammam, a professor and advisor to the Minister for Student Activities and toured The Institute for Leadership Development, a leadership campus that hosts seminars and courses designed for theoretical and practical learning. It was an impressive campus and felt like a place where learning could happen in an environment optimized for thought and expression. We could envision World ParaVolley seminars, in cooperation with their scientific researchers and students, classifiers, coaches and more. True development. Anton has been hard at work identifying potential WPV development centres around the world and establishing programming like coaching courses and classification seminars to help increase our capacity within World ParaVolley.
On this trip, Anton, Ehab and I focused on identifying new candidates in the zone and new opportunities to run courses where these candidates can continue their education in various areas. I attended part of a coaches’ seminar during the tournament, run by Dr. Sharif Sallahaddin, Vice President of the Volleyball Committee of the Arab Union, and a noted author. Hearing from the coaches directly was a valuable experience for me and opened up a dialogue about how World ParaVolley is perceived around the world. I had the pleasure of working with four gentlemen at…
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