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Botswana national Under 18 Ladies’netball team has been selected, for the first time ever, as one of the eight teams that will compete at the Tribago 2023 Commonwealth Youth Games FAST5 netball competition set for August 14th to 18th this year in Trinidad & Tobago.
The 7th Edition of the Commonwealth Youth Games will be held across both islands featuring different sporting programs including aquatics, athletics, rugby, volleyball and among them the inaugural FAST5 netball competition.
The eight Commonwealth Games Associations that will take part in the competitions were recently released by the Commonwealth Games Federation. Trinidad and Tobago were selected automatically as the hosts and they will be joined by Australia, Canada, England, South Africa, Scotland, St Vincent & Grenadines and Botswana. South Africa and Botswana are they only two countries to represent the continent. The competition will be open to athletes between the ages of 14-18.
In an interview, Botswana Netball Association (BONA) President Malebo Raditladi-Nkgakile stated that it will be for the first-time netball features in the Commonwealth Youth Games.
“Netball is a competitive sport like any other sporting code, it needs more game time and the more competitions we play for each category the more our development gets better,” she stressed.
Nkgakile added that this would also help them follow their Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) to the latter without jumping stages of development because they did not have the link between different stages.
“Because this will be our first time to compete, we believe we have to use the 2022 AUSC Region 5 team as the base to select the team to represent us at the games,” she revealed.
For his part, BONA Spokesperson Mokeresete Mokeresete said that their confirmation to participate at the competition calls for preparations. He stated that they will be relying more on the team that participated at the AUSC Region 5 games that were held in Malawi last year.
Mokeresete indicated that BONA has very good netball bases across different parts of the country adding that they will also select players from their different netball grass root development centres including Maun to form part of the team.
He explained that for them to be selected among different nations to take part in the competition they were given an opportunity to propose or show an interest by Commonwealth Games Federation. Mokeresete said that through the Botswana National Olympics Committee (BNOC) they were able to propose and they were fortunately selected to compete.
