Moorosi Tsiane
THE Lesotho Netball Association (LNA) will be seeking to put behind them the disappointment of the July under-20 Youth World Cup qualifiers when they take part in the African Union Sports Council (AUSC) Games to be held in Angola in December.
LNA public relations officer Matsepo Mohau said they had assembled a team of 14 players and commenced preparations.
“We did not perform well in the World Cup qualifiers and this will be our chance to erase the disappointment. We have assembled a 14 member team that will be cut down to 12 players,” Mohau said, adding that they held a week-long camp during the independence holidays and had been meeting every weekend afterwards.
Mohau said they would be some changes to the team that did duty in Botswana due to injuries and the fact that some players were now over the prescribed age limit.
“It would have been good to go Angola with the same team for the sake of continuity but unfortunately five players are now above the age of 20 while three have been ruled out due to injuries. So we only have four players in this team who went to Botswana.
“While we did not have enough time to prepare for the Botswana games, things are different this time around as we selected players from the LISA Games where the competition was high. We are very confident as we believe these are the best,” she said.
She said their biggest challenge, however, was the fact that all the players were students and this affected their training programme.
Meanwhile, LNA is looking to introduce a new tournament to lure more teams into joining their league which will resume early next year.
“In August we had an annual general meeting where it was decided that we suspend our league this year to give our team enough time to prepare because most of our players are students and examinations are approaching. The league will resume early next year,” Mohau said.
“We will launch the Summer Tournament competition to ensure there is action for other players and it will feature all our teams. We also aim to lure new teams to join our league and so far there have been new teams from Qacha’s Nek district and Mabote police,” she said.
Lesotho will be represented in netball, tennis, athletics and swimming in the games which are an annual event.
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