CAF African Schools Football Championships Inclusivity to Independent Colleges and Trust Schools

By Tendai Chisiri

Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA) has officially launched the inaugural CAF African Schools Championships national phase which will see government, independent colleges and trust schools locking horns for under 12- 15 national spots in both girls and girls categories in Harare Wednesday.

African Schools Football Championships started last year in South Africa under Motseope Foundation. The tournament is divided into national phase were players are selected for the national team, zonal phase where countries battle it out in various regions and then the continental phase whereby winners at regional level square off at continental level

Speaking at the official launch ZIFA FIFA forward manager and CAF schools project manager Kudzai Chitima said the launch is for the national phase of the competition going to happen on Friday and Saturday at Allan Wilson High School in Harare. ” We are here to launch the national phase where the school playing teams are going in be having a tournament for between 12-15 years. It is both boys and girls playing teams. The selected students will now be able to participate in zonal phase. For now it is the zonal Southern Africa Cosafa and other zones are in East, North, Central and West Africa. Ours in the Southern Region will hold its tournament on the first of December after the school closes and the venue will be announced. The continental phase will be held on 24th April and the venue will be announced”, Chitima said.

” We are participating in this tournament because we have seen a long and big gap the school children, the school system and the elite. When we grew up, we saw that or found very strong and quality players coming from the school system. A perfect example is the Churchill’s ” kidznet” by the legend Moses Chunga and we had very good players. Most of them went on the represent Zimbabwe at different national age groups. So in this case, we want to have a situation whereby we want to compliment the lon term plans to actually create competitive platforms, he added.

The programme is the come with ancillary programmes that will include course like coaches courses for teachers, young refrees courses and young reporters courses. There will be experts from CAF to train the young refrees when os coaches will be trained by CAF partners from France. Also there would be a safe guarding course. This will be done for both girls and boys so that students may be safeguarded from sexual and physical abuse. The national phase has equal represantation thus equal number of boys and girls as they are going to come up with a national team for both girls and boys.

Each and every person who is going through play in the tournament should be registered with FIFA Connect System. A player gets good market value if registered on it. Registration is also good as the team that develops a player, should also receive some me money when the player turns professional. Schools are encouraged that register l their players in the system and none will play without being registered. This is an annual event and the event starts in January. The national phase starts in January until September.

Zimbabwe should actually have done it from January form zonal, districts going up to the provincials but had been under FIFA ban. ” We agreed with relevant authorities that since we have been playing already and as there had been champions already in their respective associations, we arranged from r the sake of time to have finalists from the associations. The tournament wants at least eight teams for the national phase tournament. So we have two teams from National Association of Primary Heads (NAPH), two from National Association of Secondary Heads (NASH), four from Zimbabwe Independent Colleges Association (ZICA) and four from Association of Trust Schools (AST)”, he said. The other two teams the make it eight for the girls and boys categories each will be from the hosts Allan Wilson High School an Harare Girls High School.

Chitima also said those who did it make it in the finals have been given a leeway to come and prove their mettle.