370 Talents Discovered At National Youth Games

The First National Youth Games ended at the weekend with over 370 special talents discovered, according to the Minister of Sports and Chairman of the National Sports Commission, Bolaji Abdullahi.
A very excited Abdullahi said that he was very pleased with the outcome of the games, explaining that he was impressed with the large turnout of participants and even more so with the enthusiasm and skills of the young athletes.
According to Abdullahi, the first youth games achieved its primary objective, which is the early discovery and identification of talents: "We are very happy with the outcome of the games, with the turnout of athletes, their enthusiasm and skills.
With what I saw during the games, I am confident that we have a great future in sports. "I want to assure all the athletes that they are all winners. And for the special talents, we will ensure that they are part of our high performance system, which we have just established," Abdullahi stated.
The 370 special talents were discovered in 14 sports:  football, boxing, basketball, badminton, handball, power lifting, tennis, track and field and squash. Others are weightlifting, wrestling, taekwondo, volleyball and table tennis.
Two thousand nine hundred and seventeen athletes from 31 states and the FCT participated in the games that held between December 6 and December 15. Lagos, Ekiti, Jigawa, Zamfara and Edo states were absent. Notable highpoint of the games was the disqualification of 667 athletes before the start of events for being over the minimum age of 17.
574 of the disqualified athletes were male, while 93 were female. Benue, Abia and Delta had the highest number of disqualified athletes with 48, 46 and 45 respectively, while Kebbi (7), Kogi (8), Kwara (8), Ebonyi (5), Sokoto (9) and Kaduna (10) had the lowest number of disqualified athletes.
Another notable highpoint of the games was the defeat of Nigeria's Under-18 Tennis champion, Sarah Adegoke from Oyo state, in two straight sets of 6-2, 7-5 by Lizzy Pam, a secondary school student based in England, who represented Plateau state in the female singles event. Speaking later in an interview, Pam said she was inspired to victory in the final match by the American tennis sisters, Venus and Serena Williams. Pam, a 15-year-old student of Culford Secondary School, Bury Saint Edmund in England, said that the two players' performance inspired her whenever she played a match.
She said her target was to become a professional tennis player like Serena Williams or Victoria Azarenka of Belarus. Pam's discovery and her innovative strength might have solved by half the hunt for female tennis athletes who could fly Nigeria's flag at future international competitions, especially the 2014 Youth Olympics.
The Sports Minister, stated during the opening and closing ceremonies of the games that states have crucial roles to play in the early discovery of talents, as this is what separates advanced countries in sports from the developing ones.
Abdullahi said that discovered athletes from the games would be part of the High Performance Centre, which is expected to take-off in January 2014 with two Directors from the United States already employed to man the place.