CUCSA team cut due to lack of funds
Oscar Gasennelwe | Saturday September 3, 2022 11:26
Botswana Tertiary Students Sports Association (BOTESSA) was forced to leave the women's football team, volleyball and tennis players among others due to a tight budget.
BOTESSA vice president, Tebogo Kgari said a lot of deserving players had failed to make the trip. “The women's football team (23 players) is not the only sporting code that has been dropped. We had a strong men’s volleyball team (12 players), which has been left behind. We had an initial plan of 10 tennis players travelling with us but we have only travelled with four players,” Kgari said.
“In athletics, we had 25 athletes and trimmed to 18 players, but we ended up travelling with 11 athletes. In the volleyball women's team, we had 18 players but we cut 11 players,” he added. Kgari said funds had forced them to trim the team. “The reason for us leaving out players is because of lack of funds. BOTESSA is a non-profitable organisation and we rely on assistance from different institutes and organisations. When we analysed the teams in terms of sponsorships, we opted to assist teams with the lower number of players that are not sponsored.
The women's football team and the men’s volleyball team had the highest non-sponsored players and we could not take them to Malawi,” Kgari indicated. “Some organisations which could sponsor our players are still recovering from COVID-19, so we are hoping things may improve in the future.
One big challenge that we have is that local companies are not willing to invest in CUCSA Games because they may not have a market in the countries we are going to. If you sell an activity that is being played at home, then you are selling a product that they know they will benefit from,” he added.
He went on to note that other BOTESSA affiliates failed to respond well on time, which did not give them enough time to approach other organisations for sponsorship. “One of the challenges we had was that the members’ affiliates of BOTESSA responded very late and it was going to be unprofessional for us to approach an organisation a week before travelling to Malawi seeking sponsorship for our players,” Kgari noted.