The Antigua & Barbuda Football Association (ABFA), for the first time in its 87 years of existence, will play in a recognised beach tournament when they contest the 2015 CONCACAF Beach Soccer Championship in El Salvador. Photo: Provided

The Antigua team will face the Bahamas, Barbados and the United States of America in Group C at the 2015 CONCACAF Beach Soccer Championship, from March 28-April 4, 2015.

The Official Draw for the tournament took place at the Intercontinental Real San Salvador Hotel on January 26, 2015.
General Secretary (GS) of the ABFA, Gordon Derrick, said the organisation has begun taking steps to adequately prepare its coaches and players for what is a fairly new undertaking.

“We have started to identify players,” he said. “We had a training course for the head coaches of the national teams last week, for four days, where we had the top gentleman from CONCACAF, Mr Betto Lima who is a former beach soccer champion with Brazil. He was able to bring us all the necessary equipment in terms of the beach soccer balls, the field which is portable in terms of the markings, the goals and so forth.

“He went through the rules and regulations with us to get everything sorted out so, basically, at the end of the season we will then go immediately into trials and to picking a squad to be trained for the tournament which will happen at the end of March,” he added.

Hailing beach soccer as the 20/20 of football, Derrick said it will open additional avenues to both players and coaches to play and work outside of the country.

“CONCACAF has always suggested to us, along with FIFA, that for smaller developing nations that one of the easiest channels to a world cup final is through beach soccer. Bahamas is hosting the Beach World Cup in 2017 which is part of CONCACAF and of course this is a drive to try and encourage more countries to take part in it,” the GS said.

“It’s a lot less expensive to organise in terms of preparing the teams and likewise the players can become professionals. There is a beach soccer league in Europe and South America where a lot of players have been drafted from the Caribbean already coming out of the last tournament so it’s another avenue for our players to investigate,” Derrick added.

The FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup is a bi-annual international beach soccer competition contested by the national teams of the member associations of FIFA.

The tournament has taken place every year since its establishment in 1995, when it was originally supervised by Beach Soccer World Wide (BSWW) and was called the Beach Soccer World Championship but due to the sport’s rapid growth, FIFA took over the organisation of the competition in 2005 and rebranded it as an official FIFA tournament.

As of 2009, the tournament takes place every two years to allow continental tournaments to flourish without the burden of the World Cup qualifiers crowding the schedule.