By Andanje Wakhungu
Secondary School management will face dire consequences if found to have fielded non-students as team members during the ongoing term two ball games in Malava. “These games are meant for students, let the bona fide students play as we don’t want cases when it is realized later that a school has fielded non-students, ” the Kenya Secondary Schools Sports Association chairman Zachariah Mulievi has warned. He called on the game’s teachers to be responsible for their teams.”
He said that the association will be keen on scrutinizing the players as per the documentation against any forgeries. The chairman was addressing teachers and players during the official opening of the three days event that came to an end yesterday, the finals were held at Friends Malava Boys grounds. Mulievi called on all the teams to conduct themselves with dignity to avoid the use of unorthodox means to win matches. He called on the teams to respect the referees and follow the rules accordingly.
The teams were asked to abide by the rule lest they risk being disqualified and called on the school captains of soccer teams to control their fans. Many times there have been cases of emotions running high and even chaos erupting, we will hold the coach and captain responsible and we don’t want to see the same scenario that happened at Matsakha to reoccur here where the school was brought on a non-teacher to come and carelessly address us. “I want to congratulate all the teams who qualified to be at these finals but from here we will only pick one team per event to proceed to the county level” The treasurer called on the teams to be professional and exercise high levels of discipline to enable the fans to enjoy the games.
The secretary Levi Recha acknowledged the champions for making it this far, where soccer for both boys and girls, Rugby 7’s has been on the rise at the sub-county level with more teams coming up. We are the only sub-county within the country that has embraced Rugby and last year we had 7 teams with this year having 6 teams but we expect more and this is very exciting.
Last year Silungai boys’ basketball went up to the regional level and we were allowed to present two teams for the finals. “This competition has rules that the coaches should adhere to and if you were born before 1st September 2003 then you are not eligible, just like when you were admitted to school after 15 November 2022, you are not allowed to participate due to the transfer window rules.
This is to avoid poaching of players among schools and we only allow transfers of two from the same school in one season.” Before any preliminary much begins you need to take a photograph of each team to be sure who played which much and any form of teaching will attract a serious penalty. “The association will only listen to teachers in the teams and not non-teachers but are coaches of schools and this is to keep the games with the decorum needed”
