AHEAD of the FIBA Americas 2023 World Cup Central American and Caribbean Pre-qualifiers, set for El Salvador from April 16 – 18, manager of the Guyana team, Alex Graham, has disclosed that the team has dropped behind in their preparations. However, they are constantly exploring every avenue to make the teams participation possible with less than three weeks remaining.
According to an interview that involved NCN’s Travis Seymour, Graham said, “Certainly, we’re pushing as hard as we can. We’re knocking on every door that we could find. We are trying to explain to potential sponsors why this is a good investment for them. We’re not really asking people just to make donations, we ask them to make an investment in a team that’s really going, in a team that’s continuing to push the envelope.
Really, it’s a good investment in the individual players and its also a good investment in what could be achieved for Guyana, and we’re hoping that some of those doors that we’ve knocked on will actually yield good results.”
“We’re out of time really. I can give you an example. Friday (March 19) was the deadline for us to submit the uniforms for this tournament to FIBA, and when you submit the uniforms, you should really have your sponsor’s logos on there already.
We kind of submitted without the sponsors logos, and we’re hoping that we get a window in which we could fix that. So that’s just to give you a sense of how out of time we are with respect to being able to secure decent sponsorship,” he disclosed.
Speaking about the support that was already garnered by the team, he stated, “I do not want to start calling names yet, because a lot of this is still in negotiations, but I could say that we’ve got some funds from the government and those funds have been dedicated to preparations ongoing at the moment. And once we get this phase in the preparations done, we would have exhausted all of that. We were able to get a good deal out of American Airlines, it’s not exactly a sponsorship, but they were able to give us the kinds of fares that represents a significant saving in terms of what we budgeted for the tour.”
“A critical partner is E-Networks. We have a non-cash deal with E networks. E-Networks is going to broadcast some of the games live and rebroadcast those games, so that we can guarantee sponsors their exposure.” “I’ve been using the terminology, ‘investment’, and if you’re investing, you have to have some kind of results; your brand has to get visibility in this market, and E-Networks is really giving us the platform to deliver the visibility for the brands who support us.” “The only other name I probably want to call at this moment would be Hand-in-Hand (Insurance Company) who have confirmed their commitment, but there are a long list of people that we’ve been talking to for maybe two months, and we’re still hoping that those yield the kind of results that we expect.”
