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Goris Sports Schools: Inadequate Facilities and Lack of Resources Lead to Dropping Enrollment

Mariam Matevosyan

The last serious sports victory achieved by Goris residents was in 1993 when the local Zangezour football team won the Armenian championship.

Vrezh Davtyan, a member of the former Zangezour squad, says that an interest in sports begins in school when youngsters take gym classes.

Today, Goris school students take gym 2-3 times a week. Even though the schools have gymnasiums, due to a lack of proper financing, the sports equipment is either lacking or on the verge of disrepair.

Ararat Stepanyan, who teaches gym at the Aksel Bakounts Senior School No. 1, complains that the volleyball and basketball nets need replacing, they need new balls, and that they don’t have exercise mats.

Not only does the lack of proper equipment and facilities make taking gym unattractive to many, but students on the verge of graduating high school attend classes less frequently than students in the lower grades. Stepanyan says graduating students are more concerned with taking private remedial classes for college exams.

“We try to organize competitions for the students so that they get involved in sports, but the senior students focus more on the academic subjects than gym,” laments Stepanyan.

Vrezh Davtyan says that there is no supervision when it comes to sports education in schools; either from the Ministry of Education and Science or on a regional level. “The students not only do not attend gym classes, but they have no basic knowledge on the subject,” he says.

The Goris Municipality runs two sports related facilities: the Goris Youth Sports School, the Albert Ordyan Chess School.

Then there’s the Goris Regional Youth Sports School run by the Syunik Provincial Government. It’s open to kids up to 14 and six sport varieties are taught: football, volleyball, basketball, wrestling, weight-lifting and light athletics. The school has been operating for 64 years.

While classes are free, attendance has dropped dramatically. It used boast 1,000 students and 45 teams. It now has 209 students and 15 teams.

School Director Seyran Petrosyan believes the reason isn’t only the poor condition of the facility but a lack of resources. Petrosyan adds that because the school doesn’t have a main building, each sport is taught at an outside gym somewhere in Goris.

Goris plans to spend 8 million AMD in its 2013-2016 development plan to refurbish a number of its sports facilities. The town will allocate 1 million AMD from its budget and expects to raise the balance from donors and the state budget.

Another important factor when it comes to developing sports education and getting more people involved is the participation of local athletes in regional, state and international competitions.

Goris wrestling coach Tigran Aghabekyan notes that in this regard competitions are rarely held in the town due to a lack of appropriate facilities. He confesses that when compared to the wrestling facility in Gyumri, the Goris facility is an embarrassment.

The Goris Wrestling School, with its crumbling walls and dilapidated equipment, has an enrollment of 83 students. Many students drop out as a result.

“We don’t have a locker room or showers. And the place isn’t even heated,” says former student Slav Karapetyan.

The state of football in Goris is a bit more promising. The town has five teams under coach Vrezh Davtyan. The young footballers have chalked up some small but promising wins over the past years. In 2013, the Goris youth squad came in 6th place in the national championship.

Nevertheless, Davtyan confesses that the overall state of sport in Goris is poor due to a lack of interest by authorities on the local and state level.

“I’m not saying that the municipality doesn’t provide assistance but they can do so much more,” Davtyan says.

Kids from Goris and area villages attend the Goris Regional Sports School, financed by the Syunik Provincial Authority. But here too, enrollment is dropping.

School Director Artur Aslanyan says that students are prone to drop out. “If a team has twenty kids today, in a week there’ll only be ten left.”

Aslanyan says that the municipality needs to invest more in building neighborhood playgrounds to get more children involved in sports activities.

The school gets 350,000 ($900 US) per year in financing. Aslanyan describes this as a drop in the bucket. “This would just cover the travel and lodging expenses of sending twelve kids to a competition in Yerevan,” he says.

Tigran Grigoryan, director of the Albert Ordyan Chess School, boasts that Goris has some brilliant young chess players that have done well in national competitions.

In 2007, the Kajaran Copper-Molybdenum Combine donated 14 million AMD to repair the school’s roof and refurbish the interior.

Fifty students attend the school and Grigoryan is certain that some are future chess champs.

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