LAHORE: The Pakistan Federation Baseball is set to sign a contract with an American coach to prepare a strong team to compete at this year’s Asian Games and next year’s South Asian Games, PFB chairman Shaukat Javed said on Friday.

Shaukat was addressing a press conference as a guest of Sports Journalist Association Lahore (SJAL), alongside two American coaches Brain Coy Furches and Steve Devoss, PFB president Syed Fakhar Ali Shah and Pakistan captain Umair Bhatti.

He informed that Furches had completed a week-long interaction with the Pakistan team and he will come back in August to sign a two-year contract as coach.

Shaukat lamented that while Pakistan had qualified for the Asian Games, the federation still didn’t have a venue for baseball activities and had to rely on an arena at the Pakistan Sports Complex and a private housing society in Lahore to do that.

“We need funds to hold national championships while also arranging training tours for the junior and senior teams,” he said. “We are facing a debt of Rs15million while the Pakistan Sports Board releases a Rs1million grand every two years.

“They’re meagre grants given to us if you compare the budgets allocated to federations in rest of South Asia,” he added.

He appealed to the Punjab government to build a baseball stadium in order to promote the game.

Fakhar informed that both Furches and Devoss were visiting Pakistan without any renumeration and Furches said that he’d found talented players in the country.

“They can achieve good results with proper training,” he said. “My target is to improve the team’s performances.”

Devoss, who is running an NGO to promote the sports culture in different countries, added that he was making a plan with the PFB to improve the standard of the game in the country.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2021