Jamaica’s U19 Women’s Lacrosse team was recently featured in the Jamaica Observer. The newspaper highlighted the team’s need for donations in advance of the 2019 U19 World Games.
The team’s targeted donations goal is $100,000 US dollars. However, the team is well short of that goal.
Jamaica Lacrosse president Calbert Hutchinson told the Observer, “We are way behind our target in the overall budget for the team; we manage based on our own fund-raising initiative and in-kind donations to cover at least half of that. But the last time, before other smaller donations came in, we were in the red of about US$48,000, which is roughly a little over six million Jamaican dollars.”
Hutchinson continued, “So we divided that among our players and we work out an individual cost which is about US$2,500 (Jamaican $350,000) per player, so we have been reaching out to possible sponsors asking them to sponsor a girl or two for this tournament,” Hutchinson told the Jamaica Observer, while overseeing a training session at Wolmer’s Girls’ on Thursday.”
With a departure date scheduled for July 28, the team is doing all they can to ensure they meet their goal.
Hutchinson said, “One thing I have been saying for the longest time, we need to invest in sports for tomorrow and not sports of yesterday. The traditional sports are flooded and the youths are moving towards non-traditional sport and this is one of them along with rugby and fencing.”
“This is what they want and so I am appealing to sponsors out there and to corporate Jamaica, invest in our youth — and this is one way we can invest in our youth because there are so many opportunities where lacrosse is concerned,” he added.
Jamaica’s U19 Women’s Lacrosse team is comprised of mainly Jamaican-born citizens — all but two of the members of the team are from Jamaica.
Contributions can be made via the teams’ GoFundMe account. Read the full article on the Jamaica Observer’s website.
