Kudos to teachers, organisers for successful national school games
Fans follow proceedings during the boys' football semi-finals between St Anthony's Boys High School from Rift Valley Region and Shanderema Secondary School from Western at the Kenya Secondary Schools Sports Association Term Two Ball Games at Bukhungu Stadium in Kakamega County on August 11, 2023. St Anthony's won 1-0.
What you need to know:
- We must also take the time to woo sponsors for these games because this seems to be the only legitimate thing going on in this country.
- We say thanks to the teachers and hope they will do much better next year even with television rights! The sky is the limit.
The curtain fell Saturday on the Secondary Schools Term Two National Games in Kakamega.
We now know the champions in all the disciplines. We know which teams are going to represent our country in the East Africa Games to be held in Rwanda.
It isn’t an easy thing to organise anything in this county anymore. We may be accused of making mountains out of molehills by praising the organisers, but we just have to do that because they deserve it!
The teachers of this country have shown everyone that competence still exists.
Those are the same people who set last year’s national examination, supervised them, marked them and stayed for a whole year without a single cent from the national examination body!
These are the same people who stay with our children day in, day out and make them become worthy citizens! These are the same people the moneyed deride and look down upon. They are part of the remaining competent lot in this confused times!
We must tip our hats to them.
The football matches, of course, hogged the limelight and it is from there that we must start. Last week, we suggested that the teams should be increased to accommodate more representatives from very region.
This would make the games even more competitive than they already are.
The second suggestion is that the time given for these games are rather too tight.
The young boys and girls were put under a very stringent match regime that wore them out considerably, and towards the finals, it was easy to spot exhausted and spent players who couldn’t do as well as they did during the preliminaries.
There was no time given for recovery of the players. Moving from one match to the other would have required that the players have a minimum of 48 hours of rest and recovery.
This must have been deemed as a luxury but it is not. Sports science research even puts the rest period to 72 hours before the next match!
The present format may seem plausible especially when considering the fact that the games were not supposed to interfere with the academic programme of the players but it is still possible to start early enough to give some breathing space to the students participating in the games.
We do realise that the East Africa Games in Rwanda are slated to begin on August 17-29 when the schools open.
There isn’t much we can do to widen the scope but we are sure we can give our players sufficient space to be fit enough to avoid the unnecessary injuries that we have witnessed during the national games football matches held at Bukhungu Stadium in Kakamega County.
We must also take the time to woo sponsors for these games because this seems to be the only legitimate thing going on in this country.
We say thanks to the teachers and hope they will do much better next year even with television rights! The sky is the limit.
