NTA leader Gary Griffith urged that sport be used to keep youngsters away from crime by imbuing them with character-building values, speaking at an NTA rally in San Fernando on April 9, ahead of the April 28 general election. He said neither the PNM nor UNC had ever spoken about sport in any major general election campaign. "They see sport as an extra-curricular activity. They have never put sport as a prime activity. "The only time it was ever done was LifeSport and we saw what happened there – $400 million pumped and wasted, given primarily to criminal elements, that had a by-product of over 40 lives being lost." He was referring to a controversial project run under the former UNC-led People's Partnership government. Griffith said such a sum could have truly transformed TT for the better. "When I was commissioner of police we had the Commissioner's Cup. We were able to take different communities and bridge the gap in the communities where gangleaders were actually seeing their children play in a sport for their community against (the children of) another gangleader. All of a sudden sport became a catalyst to actually uniting communities. "Let them have their battle on the football field. Let us understand that it is a sport but we can burn our energies in that manner." He said that showed sport as a means of secondary crime prevention, compared to hard-policing as a primary means and the criminal justice system as tertiary crime prevention. Saying no past government has every utilised sport towards the development of TT, he vowed to turn the Ministry of Sports into a core ministry, not just a secondary ministry. Griffith spelt out at length how sports could help develop the character of young people to keep them away from a life of crime, apart from winning gold medals at international events. "You get the traits of uniformity, punctuality, teamwork, leadership, not giving up, strategy, tactics. "All of these different things assists in building the character traits of a young man or woman." But he lamented that TT had never recognised the inculcation of those benefits as an important role of sport. Griffith recalled that as a young army officer training at the UK-based Sandhurst College, about 25 per cent of his time was spent on sport as a way of developing cadets' leadership skills. "It showed the importance of a military academy understanding sport, because it showed that teamwork, that discipline, that camaraderie. It assisted me in my own development. I was the captain of my company hockey team, football team, cricket team." He said he had played in the first eleven of one sport to represent Sandhurst. "If we could get every young person to play a sport – you may not become a national sports player, you might not become world-class – but it will help develop you. "We intend to do everything possible to try to get sport to be a core curricular activity." Quipping that the PNM and UNC general election candidates had probably "never even kicked a lime," he said, "So they don't really understand the value. "So if one of them (PNM or UNC) gets back into government solely, we are going to have the same situation, the same avenue of us bypassing sport and not using it in the proper manner that it should be used to develop young men and young women and develop a country." Recalling his son (Gary Griffith III) being on the TT national under-17 team football team five years ago, he lamented that of the 23 youngsters on the squad back then, today only three were still playing football. "They have just gone by the wayside," he lamented. Griffith said in other countries such as the US and Costa Rica, the under-17 team would advance to become the under-21 team and then the under-23 team, keeping the players together as a unit over the years. However, he said in TT, teams would be quickly assembled just before a tournament and then afterwards be disbanded. "Our sports men and sports women do not need the praise after; They need the support now."