The National Olympic Committee of Kenya (NOCK) will set up a high performance training center at Kenyatta University.
NOCK Secretary General John Ogola said Olympic sports umbrella body will partner with Kenyatta University in setting up the facility.
“Kenyatta University will offer space while NOCK will develop the facility and equip it with equipment and technical personnel,” said Ogola
Ogola said center will be used to train athletes and improve the capacity of coaches.
He said NOCK has started a program of training coaches to embrace technology and sports science to be enhance performance of Kenyan athletes.
“We want to empower our coaches by educating them on the use of science and technology in their training programs,” he said.
Ogola said the days of relying on talent are over and it’s now science and technology that has taken centre stage in the preparations of athletes and competitions,” he said.
The Secretary General said they will also have a data base of coaches and technical officials for purposes of monitoring and evaluation.
Speaking during the launch of a high performance training for coaches for technical directors and coaches at Sports View Hotel, NOCK first Vice President Barnaba Korir said the initiative was in accordance with their manifesto of having a transformative agenda
“Our pre-eletion pledge was to have a new dawn by embracing new ways of managing athletes and the technical wing if sports,” he said.
Korir said other countries that Kenya was beating sports were catching with the country and hence the need of changing tactics by moving away from the manual ways of preparing teams to science and technology.
He said after this training NOCK will gauge the coaches performance during the forthcoming Commonwealth Games and Youth Olympics.
Korir said that they are looking beyond the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
NOCK athletes representative Doreen Okidi decried the low number of women coaches in sports.
Okidi said the number of women coaches in Kenya falls short of the projection by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) of having at least 30 per cent compared to 17 per cent currently in practice.
“With this kind of initiative I am optimistic that the number of women coaches will increase,” she said.