The world is experiencing very compulsive moments that are largely due to the post-pandemic phenomenon, economic instability, psychological effects, violence, among others. The nation requires the unity of its citizens to contribute to human and economic development and social peace.
Which tells us all that we should reflect. What are we doing? Where should we improve to counteract the wave of violence affecting the Dominican Republic? Of course, the most urgent task that our country has is to improve the quality of education, and sports play a determining role that provides the educational system with mobility, enthusiasm, participation, equity and equality; an ecosystem that produces cohesion and humanizes society.
I want to take four team sports that have boomed as professional leagues, but have done so to the detriment of amateur sports. We refer to baseball, basketball, volleyball and soccer.
In the previous article we talked about Olympism and the lack of mass use of sport, but this phenomenon affects the entire sports structure of the country, and limits the opportunity spaces for young people.
The supreme interest of a State is amateur sports, as mandated by the General Sports Law 356-05. Article 75 specifies the following mandate: professional sports activities must contribute to the promotion and development of amateur sports; through an entity that governs said discipline in the demarcation in which it is carried out, in order to compensate that activity. In no case, the practice of professional sport can harm or undermine amateur sport.
baseball reality
It is prudent that our readers understand how Dominican society, consciously and unconsciously, has been gradually closing the spaces for participation to our future generations. This is one of the most notorious cases in which young people are affected, as a result of the lack of a sports model in which competitions at different ages are carried out from school.
Young Dominicans do not have access to LIDOM, since to play in the baseball league they must be signed by a major league team; worse still, baseball from being a discipline in the past of national manifestation; Today, if your child doesn’t have a talent for a program to take him in or you pay for his participation in a league, he will not find a space where our children can unload their fun, entertainment and recreation.
Basketball
In the case of basketball, with different characteristics; but like baseball, the purely lucrative interest predominates. We have a professional league and the so-called higher tournaments that do not respond to a school sports system, to promote amateur sports.
Basketball in the mid-twentieth century was a discipline that was organized at the local, municipal, provincial and national levels, which has been replaced by the so-called superior tournaments, but an element that marked the difference with the past stands out.
For that golden age there was a connection with the educational system, this becomes clear when the great players of the superior tournament of Santo Domingo and other locations, where they have been inserted into the productive apparatus; and many of them are professionals, because this sport provided that opportunity when it was played in schools and universities.
We have as a result of this lack of organized overcrowding at the educational level that, despite the large number of tournaments that are held in the country, when making a selection we do not have players with the necessary skills. The reason was given to me by Leo López, who was a great connoisseur of this discipline, being the manager of the Santo Domingo Lions, where he told me that in our country there are no players who master the fundamentals, which means that they lack the education and necessary domains of the game, the result of the distancing of basketball and education.
Our children practice basketball in a rustic way, without support or organization. In more practical words, since there is no sports system from school, we have as a result that, with the national manifestation that basketball has, its contribution to human development is minimal.
Volleyball
Volleyball was one of the national sports in our country, it had a demonstration in every corner. Gradually, as has been happening with many sports disciplines, high competition has been prioritized with its Superior Volleyball league and, as a reflection of the successful project of the Queens of the Caribbean, which has as a contrast the absence of volleyball in the national geography. , that there should be in each locality a team of women in different categories from the school. In this way, contribute to a space for women that allows their integral development.
Both women’s and men’s volleyball, with an approach from the school as it was in the past, would contribute to a space of accessibility and massification of sport.
Football
Soccer in the Dominican Republic at this stage is having a great boom, creating the Dominican Soccer League (LDF), although this sport has a presence of more than 100 years in our territory, the following question arises: Where in our country Is soccer practiced massively and for free? Because in the case of middle and upper class schools, which contain this discipline in their curriculum, they require parents to pay for these additional classes. For the Dominican public system, which has the highest percentage of student enrollment in the educational system, accessibility is practically non-existent.
We can conclude that the professional has been prioritized over the collective interest, which is amateur sports, the economic over the human. Sport has no impact beyond the media; highlighting that the current sports model discriminates creating inequality, failing to fulfill its fundamental mission described by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela “sport has the power to transform the world, it has the power to inspire, to unite people like few other things, it has more capacity than governments to break down social barriers”, and we add, but from school.