By Giff Johnson
For Variety

MAJURO — The Australian government is rolling out a new-look sports training program for Pacific island nations starting in April.
The revised program will focus in two areas — developing elite athletes and promoting community-level sports activity, according to the Australian Sports Commission’s Kylie Bates, the regional coordinator for the Pacific, and Warwick Povey, elite programs and sport education officer.
These will replace an earlier scholarship training program that the Australian Sports Commission had run since prior to the 2000 Olympic Games held in Sydney.
An Australian sports outreach program will be focusing on helping Pacific islands to improve their capacity to run community-based sports programs, Bates said. The aim is to “help local organizations run sports programs themselves,” she said. Rather than take a “shotgun” approach to the region, Bates said the program will focus on only a few islands each year and then rotate to others annually over a five-year period. The three main focus areas for this program are: sports for youth aged six-12, what is described as “inclusive” sports involving disabled, women and other traditionally under-served groups, and sports leaders.
The other Australian-funded sports initiative, known as Pacific Sports Champions, is focusing on developing elite athletes and coaches, and others such as sports coordinators and organizers, sports medicine people, officials, public relations and others through a fellowship program.
Povey said that this new fellowship program is targeted at providing high-level training opportunities to champions in sport and offering professional development opportunities for people such as coaches and organizers of sports programs.
Elite athletes will be brought into the Australian Institute of Sport facilities in Canberra, an expansive training facility that houses a combination of top coaches, playing facilities, medical researchers and computer analysts who work to improve the performance of athletes in different sports.
In the earlier Australian sports program for the Pacific, the scholarship period was limited to five-to-six weeks, Povey said. Under the new fellowship program, this is being extended from months up to one year.
A key requirement of this fellowship program is that the sports people who apply must be linked to an organization in their home countries so that there is a structure for them to put to use the training that they receive in the program, Povey said.