CSED To Partner NTTF For The Development Of Table Tennis in The Niger Delta

The Nigeria Table Tennis Federation has recently granted permission to CSED (Community Sport and Educational Development) to organise a series of training seminars/clinics that will develop the skills of Game Master/Mistresses in the discovering and nurturing of the talents of primary and secondary students in the Niger Delta area.


  This development is an attempt by the Engineer Ishaku Tikon led NTTF to promote the development of the game in all parts of Nigeria, in order to increase the talent pool of table tennis players that will be available to the Federation in future. Furthermore, the current NTTF Board wants to use the ever growing popularity of the game to promote literacy and the social and general well-being of students in Nigeria.

 Aruna Quadri has recently shown that Nigerian table tennis players could aspire and make a big splash in a game that have been dominated by players of Asian origin. It would be recall that in the mid 1980s table tennis used to be played in the nook and cranny of Nigeria and it used to rival football for popularity in Nigeria.

However, in the past two decades, the popularity of the game has suffered a slump, as the talent pool of players have reduced due to the failure of educational and sporting authorities to promote it to younger generation of Nigerians, all over the country.

Table tennis in Nigeria is currently dominated by players from the Lagos Hub and Western Nigeria. Only Cross Rivers and Akwa Ibom states have been able to buck the trend, while the table tennis associations of some other states seems to have forgotten their responsibility of developing table tennis at the school sport and local government levels.

In order to fulfil the agreement between CSED and NTTF, Edema Fuludu (CSED National Coordinator) stated that CSED intends to train 120 (one hundred and twenty) Game Masters/Mistresses in 2018, through their basic table tennis course programme that would be facilitated by NTTF Instructors.

 As part of this agreement, a table tennis training course/clinic will hold in every quarter of 2018. CSED will also work hard to hold an intermediate coaching clinic for already qualified club coaches in the Niger Delta area. The intermediate coaches training will be facilitated by an overseas based ITTF Instructor.

A further addition to these training programmes will be a lecture on "safeguarding." Participants will also be provided with free drug education brochures. The training courses run by CSED are usually held at no cost to the selected attendees.

Edema Fuludu stated that CSED has also entered a partnership agreement with Basketball For Peace (BB4P) Nigeria, an NGO that was founded in 2003. BB4P which is based in Kaduna state uses the game of basketball to promote peaceful community existence. BB4P which operates in five different zones in Nigeria is led by Oliver B. Johnson (popularly known as Coach OBJ).

 The leadership of these two NGOs intend to use the goodwill that their small effort have generated to inspire Nigerian children and youths in a sport filled (Commonwealth Games, FIFA World Cup and FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup) 2018.