Maurice Kambukwe
WINDHOEK– After recently hosting a successful wheelchair basketball training camp in the capital the Namibia Paralympics Committee (NPC) has now established what will be known as the Namibia Wheelchair Basketball Federation – a first ever for the country.
The recent training camp for local wheelchair basketballers was led by British expert Ryan Raghoo,
who between the 12th and 16th of this month conducted intensive training aimed at honing the skills
of the participants and also to expose them to high wheelchair basketball workouts.
The ultimate objective was to assemble a national wheelchair basketball team that will represent
the country at next year’s inaugural Africa Paralympic Games in Morocco. According to NPC secretarygeneral Michael Hamukwaya, they have so far managed to select nine players that showed great potential during training and will form part of the founding players of the newly formed national team. He
added that NPC is in the process of recruiting more players, and more training camps will soon be held
in the regions.
“We have about nine players that we believe have potential but as indicated, this is still new and we
are under the process of assembling a final team for Morocco. So for now we just want to recruit as many
players as possible. At least with this camp – it was the first of its kind and we managed to recruit some players that we saw have the potential to make the national team.”
“We will continue working with these players and hopefully, by next month or so, we are going
to host another training camp at Oshakati that will run for two days. With the Oshakati camp it will be
another opportunity for us to see if there are still more talents in the regions to pick from. We want to
do this kind of camp in the regions for the next three months,” said the Para-athletics administratorcum-
trainer.
Hamukwaya furthermore hailed the training camp as a huge success, which he says gave birth
to the newly-established Namibia Wheelchair Basketball Federation. “The most important thing that we need to attend to before we embark on our plans of participating at next year’s Africa Paralympic Games is to meet certain requirements, such as joining similar world wheelchair basketball federations that are
affiliated to the mother body, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC). So if we want to play in international events we need to be recognised by IPC and others. It’s a new initiative for Namibia and we welcome it, but at least for now is to make sure the federation is registered by end of September with IPC.”