About two decades ago in one of the poorest parishes in Grenada, a small group of female teachers along with a, then unknown, coach decided to start an athletic training program to help local youth.
Despite starting with little training in athletics, these women and Paul Phillip established a mission to help local youth avoid getting caught up in village gangs and leverage their athletic talents to obtain university scholarships. They were inspired by the female principal of the community’s secondary school whose students regularly attained good results in athletics while at school, but afterwards would disappear.
Since its formation, the St. David TrackBlasers club has helped about 40 young women and men earn athletic scholarships to U.S. universities, with several members going on to win NCAA Division I championships, gold medals in world championships, and a commonwealth games gold medal. In addition, both of Grenada’s medalists in this year’s Olympic Games, Anderson Peters and Lindon Victor, were members of the club.
My wife Janice and I are immensely proud to support the club through our PETNA Foundation – and I am even more proud to have been born in a country and a region that continues to show its fighting spirit and punch way above our weight class. Don’t underestimate Grenada or the broader Caribbean.
To put things in perspective, Grenada has a population of approximately 112,000 and the community that the athletes are drawn from has a population of less than 12,000. Often times, larger countries can dominate the conversation around the Olympic Games. But looking through the lens of relative achievement shows there is much to be proud of for smaller countries as well.
