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Innocent Kurira, Sports Reporter

THE Basketball Union of Zimbabwe (Buz) is holding a five-day coaching clinic in Bulawayo which is being facilitated by Kenyan veteran coach Ronnie Owino.

THE Basketball Union of Zimbabwe (Buz)

The course is meant to equip developmental coaches with the latest coaching trends.

The programme which started on Monday ends on Saturday.  It is being held at Eveline Girls High School and will be followed up by a referees’ course which is set to be held in Harare.

Owino, born in the lakeside town of Kisumu in 1964 is well known throughout Africa having traversed the continent for over three decades as a player, coach and now a FIBA coaches’ instructor. He has visited 25 African countries.

He started playing club basketball while in high school and blossomed at the University of Nairobi in 1984 where he stared for the campus team popularly known as “Terrorists”.

At 19 years, his dazzling exploits as a point guard saw him earn his first call up to the Kenya team in 1983. But it was two years later that he debuted for Kenya in the FIBA AfroBasket in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire.

Owino was a member of the Kenya team that did duty in the fourth All-Africa Games in Nairobi in 1987. The team finished fourth.

After the All-Africa Games qualifiers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1990, Kenya landed a trip to Kentucky, USA where they trained for two weeks for the Pan African Games.

covid-19

Buz president Joe Mujuru said he was pleased the country to have Owino in the country and having started holding such programmes having seen the Covid-19 pandemic hinder such programmes in the last two years.

“We are having our Fiba level one coach course. We have 15 participants from all over the country taking part. We are trying to improve the quality of trainers in our school system. You will find out that most of the participants are developmental coaches,” said Mujuru.

“This programme comes out of the goals that we developed from the strategic meeting that we had last year where one of our five goals is increasing the quality of basketball in schools.

“Basketball just like any other sport depends on the school system more so in the absences of academies and other development structures. Schools therefore are the main development system that is there for basketball.

basketball

“Schools are the hub for basketball development which is why we have deliberately gone out to the high school and primary school coaches so that they impact this knowledge at school level.

“We are happy that we have an uptake of these courses and it makes us hopeful that if we start at developmental level we will start to see the rewards in four to five years to come. We have another course lined up for the referees,” he added.

Meanwhile, The new Bulawayo Basketball Association league season is tentatively set for October 7 after the pre-season is done. The final date will however be confirmed after the Bulawayo Basketball Association AGM meeting which is scheduled for September 10.