Boye Oyerinde, the South-West representative on the board of Nigeria Squash Federation (NSF), on Thursday in Abuja, was re-elected as the federation’s president.

Oyerinde in his post-election speech, promised to organise more trainings and tournaments for players and officials.

Oyerinde retained the presidency of NSF by the closest of margins.

He polled six votes out of the 11 votes cast to defeat his opponent Sunday Wilson who got five votes during the elections, held at the Moshood Abiola National Stadium.

CSP Yakubu Mailafia from the North West zone was elected Vice president of the federation after securing seven votes to defeat his opponent, Umar Yusuf, who got four votes.

Oyerinde, fielding questions from newsmen after his re-election, said that he would continue from where he left towards uplifting the image of Squash.

“If you’ve followed Squash in the last four years, we’ve tried to be more visible. You know our sport by design is hidden, if there is a Squash court around here, you probably wouldn’t know.

“So, in essence, we need more media publicity to help us project the image of the game in the country. We need to have more presence on social media and that’s exactly what we are going to do more in this new dispensation,” he said.

Oyerinde noted that prior to his first tenure, nothing was happening in Squash in the country, saying that he is able to achieve alot within the last four years.

“Today, there is a lot going on. Squash has been approved by the Professional Squash Association to be played in Nigeria and is now a compulsory sport at the National Sports Festival.

“We now have a database of our players and a functional website where you can view our national ranking and our players are categorised from U-13, U-16, U-19 and the Seniors.

“We’ve also added more medals at the sports festival with the doubles. So, we have mixed doubles, we have male and the female doubles,” he said.

According to him, we currently have a lot of our facilities being remodeled and renovated across the country.

“In the last despensation, we were able to distribute kits to all 36 states of the federation, including the FCT and four clubs,” Oyerinde said.

He noted that they were able to train the federation’s coaches, players and officials.

“Our officials are now following the World Squash Officiating programme, while our coaches are now also certified up to WSF Level 1, which is equivalent of our own NSF Level 3.

“For the first time in 20 years we were able to participate at the men’s world team championship in 2019 and we hope to follow that up with participation in 2021 in Malaysia later this year.

“So, the good thing for us is that we are not starting where we were four years ago. We now have a solid foundation to build on,” the president stressed.

“We have a fantastic team moving forward and you will see the difference in the way we ramp up our programmes as we develop.

“So, there will be more training programmes for our players, coaches, officials and we hope to have more tournaments locally to develop more, especially the zones,” he said.