Over 1 000 pupils for schools netball league

Namibia Schools Sport Union (NSSU) acting national coordinator Roger Kambatuku says more than 1 000 pupils are anticipated to compete in the revamped schools netball national league.

In an exclusive interview with Desert FM, Kambatuku says: “Athletes anticipated in the national school league are over 1 000 across all regions.

“We are conservative normally when you look at the studies conducted, not all the schools participate, and some of the schools have good reasons.”

He says some zones or clusters only have one secondary school which cannot find an age group to play against.

“I think we want to implement those from under-13 to 19 years. Not all schools will have the capacity to implement all the age groups,” Kambatuku says.

He says a large group of children want to participate, adding that the NSSU provides a platform for pupils to further their netball careers.

He says the union has an aim to implement the leagues across all its sport codes.

“As for the netball national leagues, we realised that we cannot only depend on government funding. The NSSU’s code committee realised that there is a need to go to ‘corporate Namibia’ and convince them to also invest in these innovations.

“The government alone cannot do it. Initiatives of this nature and this level normally don’t succeed without private involvement,” he stresses.

Kambatuku acknowledges the decline in school sport, attributing it to a number of factors.

“I think one is the issue of funding to a lesser extent, and it’s up for debate, and mainly the involvement of teachers at school.”

He adds that teachers focus on other academic programmes that are more important.

“When we joined the NSSU over two years ago, one of the key issues at the time was that children must play because we noticed a decline in school sport in the country.

“We have also noticed that school sport gravitated towards hosting trials instead of engaging the pupils in meaningful competitions,” he says.

He argues that a league is just one form of what the NSSU plans to bring back. “It’s not only netball. I think it’s a message that we are spreading across all our 15 sport codes under our umbrella.

“The idea is to engage these children in meaningful developmental sports activities and competitions in a consistent way. That is the message we are preaching.”

Kambatuku says the NSSU code committee meeting held in January was a start to engaging the federations.

“That is why we developed that ‘blueprint’ not just for netball but advocating for all our sport codes, especially the main ones.

“I am talking about football, basketball, volleyball, netball and hockey. Those are our major codes where children can play meaningfully,” he says.

“If you take NSSU athletics, for example, it’s an activity that happens over one term, which is at the beginning of the year. So this year, we want to do something different and maybe have a competition later in the year.

“We can bring the pupils back to run twice at national level and not only once off that they do a year.”

He says this is a strategy that the union wants to implement in all the sport codes.

Kambatuku, however, acknowledges the cost implications in the implementation of the blueprint across all sport codes.

“It’s a very expensive exercise and the idea is also not to make these games expensive because that is what they normally are. We want to start on a very basic level where the schools can play within their proximity,” he says.

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