As the Social Media Week (SMW) comes to an end in Lagos, a social media group, ``Making of Champions’’, says it will soon launch a club to groom some athletes it has discovered.
Bambo Akani, the founder of ``Making of Champions (MOC)’’ told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Friday in Lagos that the proposed club would be launched on March 26.
``We are in the final draft of the athletics club and we will launch the club on March 26. The Jamaicans have two professional track clubs and it has helped them.
``We hope people will support our vision of a professional athletics club,’’ he said.
Akani said the organisation had been able to discover athletes from across the country using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, adding that they would be groomed toward the 2020 Olympic Games.
He said that MOC would continue to use the social media to create more awareness about athletics.
``MOC has made a lot of athletes to be social media-friendly. At least you have to be on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube and even in all.
``It is a revolutionary way of bringing athletics back to life. Athletics is not like football, during the week, we had a twitter chat to enlighten people,’’ he said.
Contributing, Deji Aliu, the Head Coach of MOC, also said that the body was here to stay, noting that he was optimistic that athletes would gain immensely from the project.
``I actually joined the MOC to be able to impact positively on young athletes, this is just the beginning of MOC, it is not a flash,’’ he said.
The organisation came into existence in 2013, due to the dismal performance of Nigerian athletes at the 2012 Olympics.
In 2015, Making of Champions became the foremost online community for Nigerian athletics with over 125,000 blog views.
It has over 100,000 views on Youtube Channel, over 21,000 on Facebook fans 1,500 followers on Twitter and 450 on Instagram.
The goal of MOC is to train athletes to a world-class level in Nigeria, to ensure that the country becomes a dominant force in world athletics by the 2020 Olympics. (NAN)