BOTSWANA WINS SILVER AT CUCSA GAMES
Botswana Tertiary Student Sports Association (BOTESSA) finished with a Silver medal after South Africa, at the 20th Confederation of University and Colleges Sports Association (CUCSA) games which ended this past weekend in Lilongwe, Malawi.
Ahead of the games, BOTESSA declared that they will challenge for first position as they were looking to improve on their third place finish obtained back in 2019 when Botswana were the hosts.
Speaking to Sun Sport after their arrival on Monday, BOTESSA President, Keorapetse Setlhare praised the efforts of the team and shared that they performed beyond expectations. “We achieved our objective. We struggled financially to send the team to Malawi, the expectation was to send at least 120 athletes but unfortunately on the eleventh hour, because of budget constraints, we had to cut the number of our teams and were left with only 76 athletes. The good thing is that we performed beyond expectations and managed to scoop 2nd position.” Botswana amassed seven (7) gold medals, eight (8) silver medals and eight (8) bronze medals to finish with overall medal count of 23, two medals behind South Africa who finished on pole position with 25 medals. Setlhare however called for support from all BOTESSA stakeholders as he insisted that there is still a lot of room for improvement. “The most important thing is that, all institution must sponsor their athletes, we are a group sporting code, and so all our affiliates’ members must support their athletes. We had to leave some athletes due to financial challenges but I strongly believe that if their institutions had supported them, we would have travelled with them and we expected gold medals from some of them,” he said.
BOTESSA president also highlighted that their preparations showed that they were going to do well as they had two training camps before the games.
He also revealed that, athletes at brigades and other government institutions were left out as the Ministry of Basic Education could not fund the trip. “The Ministry always assists us during these games but that was not the case this time around and we left behind a good number of our athletes, had we taken them we would have finished first. We have 67 affiliate members including brigades, we had athletes from brigades in the just ended games and for us it was a huge milestone as it was their first time,” Setlhare said. Setlhare added that the 20th CUCSA games were also a learning curve that they need to be more precise with their selection of athletes they take to the competition next year, highlighting they selected only athletes who were expected to bring medals, hence a small number of athletes taken to the games managed to register impressive medal count. He said South Africa also sent a smaller group of athletes but ended up as champions of the tournament.
“It is not necessarily ideal sometimes to take a larger group of athletes, you must however select your best athletes, who you know can bring medals, and South Africa used the same strategy. It is very costly to take many athletes. For this year’s games, our budget was
P1.8 million but we could not get that amount and had to cut down the size of the team so this was also a good learning curve,” he underlined.
BOTESSA is also expected to send their rugby team, Males and Female, to Kimberly, South Africa on the 22nd
of September 2022, where they will compete in the sevens rugby developmental tournament thanks to the invite by University Sport South Africa in conjunction with Federation of International Sports Universities (FISU).