[Sport] Frustration grows among organisers about return for youth sport

[_Happy boy]

The improved weather will undoubtedly push some kind of return to organised sport on to the political agenda in the coming days and weeks – in which realm, it is worth noting a letter from 80 sportspeople in Northern Ireland to the Stormont Executive last week.

Signed by well-known figures from across the sporting spectrum, it urges the political powers in the north to take “immediate action to mandate the resumption of youth sport in Covid-safe environments so as to begin to address the wellbeing crisis among our young people”.

One of the 80 signatories to the Stormont letter is Armagh’s All-Ireland winning defender and performance sport manager at Queen’s University, Aidan O’Rourke. It emerged from conversations he and other coalface operators were having late last year, born of the frustration of seeing all the work that had been done to put protocols in place in sports clubs across the province ignored once greater restrictions came in.

“It’s a movement that has been coming together kind of underground since before Christmas,” says O’Rourke. “We have been holding back on it and asking ourselves should we go with it a few times. And then when the figures post-Christmas were as bad as they were, we knew it wasn’t the right time because obviously you don’t want to come across or be painted as a load of Covid-deniers. Nothing could be further from the truth. My parents are at home, cocooning, patiently waiting on their vaccine and I am extremely careful around Covid.”

In a complicated world, their essential argument is straightforward. Every sports club did their bit last summer to put the machinery in place to allow youth sport to happen. Covid officers, temperature checks, advance forms, all the rest of it. Youth sport is taking place in countries right across Europe, sanctioned by governments who reason that the mental health risk of banning it outweighs the viral risk of allowing it to go ahead.