Pascalinah Kabi
MASERU — Redskins Volleyball Club are struggling to raise funds to enable the club to travel to Namibia this week to defend their Inter-Club Zone VI championships title, the Sunday Express has learnt.
The championships are set to kick off on Friday and run until Sunday.
The failure to raise enough funds could jeopardise the club’s ambitions to defend their regional title at the tournament.
Redskins coach, Tšepo Raletoane, on Friday confirmed the cash crunch.
Raletoane said the club had so only managed to raise enough money for transport.
“The commission (Lesotho Sports and Recreation Commission) has given us M36 000 and we’ve already used M30 000 to hire a vehicle from them,” Raletoane said.
“So right now we only have M6 000. When we get there we will need food and accommodation.
“But we will sort that out when we get there if the business community does not help us,” he said.
Raletoane said they were struggling to raise funds to buy food and pay for accommodation for the delegation.
“Right now that’s what we have and as usual we are still waiting to hear from the business community whom we’ve asked help from.”
Raletoane however said they were confident that they will travel to Namibia in spite of the hiccup.
“Our objective right now is to defend our title and we are not going to allow anything to stand in our way,” he said.
“We are used to these kinds of problems and we are not going to allow them to stop us from achieving our goal.
“Sometimes we sleep in our cars when attending big tournaments like this one and now that we have transport, we are optimistic we will defend out title,” Raletoane said.
He said they were preparing their players both physically and mentally to ensure the cash crunch does not affect their performance.
Redskins went into camp on November 7 to prepare for the tournament. The club recently stepped up its preparations by training twice a day.
“The two weeks that we’ve been together has helped us in terms of working as a unit unlike during the league games where we meet during weekends only.
“Our players’ heights are fine and we’ve got the experience, exposure and are training extra hard to ensure that we raise Lesotho’s flag high once again,” Raletoane said.
He said he will announce his final 12-man team tomorrow.
Seventeen players are currently in camp.
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