Ellina Mhlanga Harare Bureau
THE national Under-20 handball teams have begun their preparations for the Region Five Games to be staged in Johannesburg, South Africa, next month.

The competition is set to run from September 27 to October 9 with countries from the Southern Africa region expected to take part.

Zimbabwe Handball Federation technical delegate, Bernard Muzanemhamo, said preparations are underway for the team to participate in the tournament.

“We are sending both the boys and girls teams and preparations have started. We started our selection process last year during the Nash tournaments and National Youth Games.

“We had another selection this year.

“The teams had a two-week training camp early this month. The girls were at Harare’s Girls High School and the boys were in Kwekwe,” said Muzanenhamo.

In their previous outing in 2014, Zimbabwe got bronze medals from both the boys and girls sections.

Muzanenhamo said they are hopeful of another fruitful event when they battle it out in South Africa.

“We are hoping our teams will do better than what they did the last time we took part in this tournament when we didn’t have enough time to prepare. This time around we believe the team has more time to prepare.

“They will have another two weeks in camp before their departure for South Africa,” said Muzanenhamo.

The national association is currently operating without an executive following the suspension of the previous leadership for two years by the Sports Commission for failing to comply with provisions of the Commission’s Act early this year.

And Muzanenhamo said this has had some negative effects on their programmes including the ongoing preparations.

Meanwhile, Sports Commission acting director-general, Joseph Muchechetere, said they have put on hold their plans to hold a stakeholders meeting that was expected to deliberate on how the federation’s elections were going to be held due to some technical issues that need to be addressed.

“That’s the position, we were supposed to have a stakeholders meeting but in the process we realised that there are few technical issues which needed the board’s decision.

“The board was not there for a bit of time, now they are back so the board is meeting soon. That’s where we are going to present those issues and once they make a decision we will move on.

“It’s a procedural issue we need cleared. It’s unfortunate it has taken a bit of time. The first time they (ZHF) were suspended, immediately the board’s term of office expired before they were given three months.

“It expired again and they were out of office for two months before their term was extended to December. So once the resolution is made we will move forward,” said Muchechetere.

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