News and Media

News

Dr. Kyle Pierce voted Ghana’s Sports Coach of the Year

Weightlifting Ghana’s 2016 calendar ended on an extremely good note with its Head Coach Dr Kyle Pierce being voted by Ghanaian sports fans as the “Coach of the Year” and GWF sweeping most of the sports excellence awards in Ghana’s two most prestigious sports excellence awarding institutions; the Ghana Sports Fans Awards and the Sports Writers Association of Ghana Awards.

The Ghana Sports Fans Awards is aimed at giving sports followers the chance to vote for sports personalities who excelled in the year under review and is organised by an Accra based radio station, Happy FM which is one of Ghana’s most-listened sports station.

President of the Ghana Weightlifting Federation (GWF) had this to say about Dr Pierce in his end of year message to Ghana;

“I want to personally say a big thank you to our Head Coach, Dr. Kyle Pierce who I always compare to the likes of Antonio Contes and Pep Guardiolas in football, because he is the finest weightlifting coach any country will love to have, his love and dedication for the sport and commitment to the development of young talents is unmatched and it was through his brain work together with his technical committee that we are where we are today”.

“Dr Kyle Pierce joined the Ghana Weightlifting Federation in 2014 and since his association with the team, his contribution to the tremendous growth of weightlifting in Ghana is extremely remarkable, his love for our country and especially the deprived communities where most of our weightlifting talents are found, is unimaginable, one of such communities is the Odododiodio Constituency in the Greater Accra Region where most of our young weightlifters reside”.

It would be recalled that Dr. Kyle Pierce started his coaching stint in Ghana by training 27 coaches under an Olympic Solidarity Programme in 2014 and was the Head Coach of the National Team to the Commonwealth Games in Scotland in 2014.

Dr Pierce for the first time qualified weightlifting to the 2016 Olympic Games on merit, hitherto, Ghana’s qualification to the Olympics from the Universality Place (Wild Card).

Very recently, he led the Ghana National Weightlifting Team, the Black Cranes to Penang, Malaysia to win two gold medals, one silver and a bronze medal in the 2016 Commonwealth Championship.

At the Ghana Sports Fans Awards, also the President of the GWF was voted for by the Sports fans of Ghana as The Sports Personality of the Year whilst Weightlifting and GWF Secretary General got short-listed for Sports Discipline of the Year and Administrator of the Year respectively.

In the SWAG Awards (which is voting by all the Sports Journalists in Ghana) Olympian, Christian Amoah was voted for as the Male Weightlifter of the Year. African bronze medallist Ruth Baffoe was also named as the Female Weightlifter of the Year. Richmond Osarfo (17 years) who took the world by storm and won two medals in his first major international competition, was voted for as the Sports Discovery of the Year and putting the icing on the cake, the GWF President Ben Nunoo Mensah was voted for as The Sports Federation President for the Year 2016.

Source: GWF MEDIA & PUBLICITY UNIT