Making a case for our national netball side

Our netballers are in Zambia tackling the twin challenge of the African Netball Championship and 2019 World Cup qualification.
The top two teams here will qualify for the Netball World Cup in July 2019 and out of contenders that include Zambia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Kenya, it is inconceivable that the She Cranes will not be in Liverpool next summer. At the time of writing this we had already accounted for Namibia 72-47, Malawi 51-46, Kenya 61-42, Botswana 65-45.

No excitement
So, one might wonder why isn’t the country in lockdown, completely paralysed with excitement?
We are ranked third on the continent and seventh in the world. We are in places that football can only dream of. Yet little gets noticed as the She Cranes go about their tasks with quiet efficiency.
The significance of what the She Cranes is doing is further amplified by the fact that they have no business punching at this weight at all.
Our qualifying campaigns are often stories of embarrassment and many a benevolent host offering to close funding gaps.
In fact, it could be argued that South Africa and especially Malawi are ahead of us in rankings because they have the funds to attend more points-awarding tournaments. We on the other hand only go to those that our humbling dinner and car-wash fundraisers will allow.
Still our talent shines through and the She Cranes are often the darlings of neutrals. I should add, perhaps more out of pity.
Shouldn’t this over-achieving underdog then, endear itself to a nation? Far from. Not many Ugandans think much of netball.
The sport maybe as old as formal western education itself, but there isn’t much of a local competition to talk off and the sport must sometimes borrow its stars from other sports like Basketball.
It seems the chances of Netball in a football-mad and underfunded nation such as ours are limited. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The popularity of a sport can’t be forced upon people, but it can be deliberately and consistently practiced until it sits on top of the minds of our restless youth.
This must start in schools and churches. When schools and church groups play, parents watch. This could be the self-perpetuating cycle that netball is crying out for.

Peace’s inspiration
I should note that this is a matter that can’t be left to stretched out individual associations or the inspiration of Peace Proscovia. The national budget now directly allocates funds to football. It is about time that Netball gets considered too. And that must be followed by the kind of policy incentives that we see in very successful nation-wide vaccination campaigns for example.
And when all that is done, consider this. Netball has already taken us to the World cup twice and when it comes to how much the public image of a country can be lifted, sports aren’t that discriminative. John Akii Bua or Stephen Kiprotich have enhanced the nations image more than all of football put together. Given a chance, netball can too.

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MBanturaki