Help us send Palesa to Russia with love
KZN WATER polo star Palesa Hlela has her sights on the World Cup in Russia next month, having made the national side.
The final-year University of Pretoria sports management student from Howick stayed at home for the last World Cup in New Zealand, as a reserve for the team.
This time around, Hlela is in danger of not being able to board a flight to Moscow because of a lack of funds.
“It’s a pay your own way trip,” she told The Independent on Saturday.
The goalkeeper’s journey to making the national team has already exhausted her family’s coffers having just travelled to the Czech Republic to play for South Africa in the 2018 EU Nations Water Polo Cup.
“It’s not viable for my parents. They cannot take out another loan,” she said, adding that she had also benefited from donations from their work colleagues. Her father is a university lecturer and her mother is a teacher.
She was looking for R28 000 but at the same time the organisers were campaigning for the costs to come down, she said.
Hlela’s water polo career started when she was in Grade 8 at Pietermaritzburg Girls’ High.
“I drifted into the sports office and the swimming coach suggested I would be perfect for water polo because I had long arms. The trials for the Midlands team were at the end of that week.” She recalled going along. “I knew nothing about water polo. I just had to figure it out and I got hooked.”
Hlela found herself in the regional team followed by the provincial team and eventually the South Africa Under-17 side in her matric year and left Girls’ High with her honours for water polo.
Her coach, Bev Shuttleworth, said that in addition to being an asset to GHS’s swimming team, she was “a natural in the water and so easily learnt how to play water polo”.
If anyone wants to help they can contact her mother Nthabi Hlela at hlelanthabi@gmail.com or call her on 071 361 5632.