Overweight concerns for softball coach
Thato Kala | Tuesday June 10, 2014 17:27
Khupe watched the Shell-Vivo final on Sunday afternoon and will only have four players drawn from the two finalists - Dinare and BDF IX.
But the Scramblers coach is worried a significant number of the national team players are not in good shape to compete at international level.
“The players are good but quite a number of them are overweight, and we need to work on their weight and physical fitness,” Khupe told Mmegi Sport.
The 22 went straight to camp after the Sunday final and the coaches will trim the squad to 17 before Saturday.
Khupe said he was looking for aggressive and offensive players as Botswana’s weakness has been failing to score at international tournaments.
“We are trying to identify those who can be very offensive, who can hit the ball hard, because we have not been scoring and that is our weakness,” he said. After selecting the final squad of 17 to travel to Netherlands for the tournament, Khupe hopes to play a friendly match against neighbours South Africa.
He said they primarily used two tournaments in Jwaneng and Selebi-Phikwe to pick the squad that has a balanced mix of northern and southern players. “We had statistics and there are those that have been excelling in Jwaneng and the Selebi-Phikwe tournaments. We also got one or two players to reinforce the squad from the finals,” he added.
The national team’s next camp is scheduled for June 28. The final camp will be at the end of July and runs up to August 10 when the team departs for the tournament from 15-24 August in Haarlem, Netherlands.
Police IX and Bears have jointly contributed players to the provisional squad. The Police quartet of Nametsegang Passman, Oreabetse Mojeremane Oratile Hamati and Kagiso Lowang have made the cut while Bears’ catcher Melitah Seabelo, Keabetswe Mhotsha, Malebogo Ramaphane and Tshepo Letsholo are also vying for places in the final squad.