After a poor show by Central Region during the national Under-20 trials, some coaches from the area have decided to approach future competitions differently.

Only one athlete from the Region made it to the 30-member team heading to Cali, Colombia for the World U-20 Championships that will run from August 1 to August 6.

Samuel Kibathi who won the 5000m in the U-20 trials had only arrived a week earlier from Japan where he is based.

The coaches from Nyandarua met in Nyahururu Friday and agreed that the County will be holding monthly “competitions” to keep regular track of the runners’ shape.

Prior to the U-20 national trials, Athletics Kenya had facilitated regions to have training camps for selected athletes in that age group. Central had two such camps, one in Ndundori in Nyandarua and another in Thika, Kiambu each holding 40 runners.

The central region is the only area that did not hold its own trials to pick a team for the U-20 national trials from the 80 athletes in the camps.

Instead, the region handpicked about 30 athletes with the majority coming from the camp in Ndundori, Nyandarua.

“It was shameful to see the runners we took to Nairobi being overlapped in the U-20 national trials. The mistake we made was failure to hold trials and we picked athletes without knowing their shape,” Nyandarua AK chairman Francis Kamau Mwaniki said after holding a meeting of coaches based in Nyahururu to review the area’s performance in the ended track and field season.

In a message to coaches who did not attend the meeting Mwaniki wrote, “it was agreed that we shall be holding Nyandarua athletics competitions every end month beginning August 27 to gauge our athletes,

“We shall be holding all events from 100m to 5000m and field events except high jump and pole vault, he said adding that it will not be possible to hold high jump and pole vault due to lack of landing gears,”

Mwaniki added that when the cross country season comes the County will be holding regular County cross country races similar to the track season ones.

“We will be keeping records of each athlete’s performance in each of these competitions so that we are sure which athlete we can pick if we find ourselves in the same situation of not holding trial for any national competition,” the Nyandarua AK chairman added.

Similarly, Francis Kamau Esmi who is also a coach said that handpicking the athletes for the U-20 trials did not go down well with the majority of runners who attended the training camps.

“While the U-20 national trials were on, a lot of (Central Region) athletes left out kept calling demanding to know what criteria was used to pick some and leave others,” Esmi said.