Mick Jagger celebrates three years of Sport for Life! in St Lucia with West Indies Cricket
Mick Jagger spent time this week giving advice to young people attending the Sport for Life! International (SFLI) programme in St Lucia, West Indies.
The Rolling Stone was attending the One Day Cricket International between West Indies and Pakistan as a guest of SFLI, the West Indies Cricket Board and sponsors Digicel.
Mick Jagger said he strongly supported SFLI's programmes, based at international cricket grounds, to equip disadvantaged young people with academic and cricket skills. He was keen to meet the participants himself to learn how their lives were being guided and to encourage them to make the most of the opportunities that SFLI's programmes offered.
Talking to the Sport for Life! students, Mick Jagger said that cricket, and West Indies cricket in particular, was one of his lifetime passions. For West Indies cricket to be strong again the next generation needed both cricketers and fans with talent, passion and life skills. He believed that programmes such as those offered by SFLI, which combine delivering academic and life skills as well as cricket, would help to return cricket to its proper place as the single most unifying force in the West Indies.
Sport for Life! International (SFL) is an international community education and cricket programme for disadvantaged 10-16 year olds currently running for 38 weeks a year in Barbados, St Lucia, St Vincent & The Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago, the UK and Pakistan, see www.sport-for-life.org/caribbean and www.sport-for-life.org/pakistan .
It is based in SFLI learning centres, complete with IT, established by Sport for Life!, at Test Cricket Grounds and international cricket stadiums in those countries. It has the backing of the local communities, cricket authorities and governments in each country. The programmes comprise five elements - maths, English, IT, healthy lifestyle training and cricket.
SFLI was invited to start programmes in St Lucia by the Minister of Sport Lenard Montoute in 2008 and was officially launched at Beausejour in April 2009 by the St Lucia government, St Lucia Cricket Association, sponsors and members of the England Cricket Team and England and Wales Cricket Board. The learning centre was named after St Lucia's famous cricketer
Francis Mindoo Phillip and is supported in St Lucia by Windward & Leeward Brewery, Le Sport, the British High Commission, the Coltstaple Trust, The Ella and Nesta Fergusson Trust and the West Indies Cricket Board. Regional sponsors include the Mustique Charitable Trust, through whom Mick Jagger's support and enthusiasm for the project originated.
It has run weekly Saturday morning programmes at Beausejour for 50 young people since September 2008 and was officially chosen as the ICC's legacy programme for the World Twenty20 in the West Indies 2010.