Accra, Nov. 28, GNA - A new sports facility dubbed: "the National Junior Sports Programme", targeting athletes in five selected first cycle schools in the Awutu Afutu/Senya Districts, has been instituted, and it would be on pilot basis.

The programme, which takes off in earnest in partnership with the local district authority to ensure all-year activities for sportsmen and women to improve on their performances, would focus on best athletes from the top-five sports schools in the districts.

Mr Larry George Botchway, Executive Director of Gibbons Sports Foundation, a Sports NGO, the initiators of the facility, told the GNA Sports at the end of special games marking the foundation's fifth anniversary celebration at Kasoa, in the Central Region.

Selected teams from the region competed in five lesser-known sports including basketball, volley and table tennis while a seminar was organised for sports journalists under the theme; "propelling lesser-known sports, the role of the sports journalist". Mr Botchway said the foundation was liasing with its foreign partners to supply the necessary equipments needed to accelerate the programme at the schools.

When successful, the facility would to be extended to other schools in the region, but only to those who take sporting activities seriously. Mr Botchway said the idea was to enable the region to be the hub of Ghana's future athletes and to take the "commanding heights" in all sports in the country.

The foundation, which has been assisting needy but brilliant children and also supplying used sports equipments to teams and schools in the districts, gave scholarships to four athletes, three of them girls.

They were, Abigail Appiah, a netball/footballer at the Odupon Kpehe Zion JSS, Gifty Acquah of the Pentecost Primary School, both at Kasoa; Dorothy Obuobi, a table tennis player of the Winneba District Council JSS and the only male, Isaac Owuba of the Anglican Primary School, Winneba.

They would be provided with textbooks, school uniforms and sports kits to unable them combined their schools curriculum and sports programmes effectively.