BONA hosts successful charity tournament
All roads led to the Botswana Netball Association (BONA) courts over the past weekend for the netball mini charity tournament dubbed, “The Charity Mini Netball Tournament”.
The tournament started on Saturday morning and featured Under-21 sides affiliated with BONA. It also featured the national Under-21 team that is set to take part in the AUSC Games in Malawi.
The tournament started with a game between the Under-21 national team up against Police Under-21 and the former proved to be the better side on the day. They defeated Police 33-13.
The other game on Saturday that proved to be an entertaining game was between Vipers Under-21 and Police Under-21, which was playing its second game on the day.
When the games started, the two teams went pound to pound with each other in the first quarter. The game started gaining momentum as the goal shooter for Vipers proved to be a thorn on the Police’s side and made sure she capitalised on every opportunity that came her way.
It was now up to Police to come with up with a strategy to also find their rhythm and score goals and they did so by converting their goal attacker into goal striker and they narrowed the lead. Vipers went on to win the first quarter by 10 goals to nine.
In the second quarter, Vipers continued from where they left off and added on its tally to lead Police by 15 goals to 12 but that was not really enough for Vipers to run away with the game. Police narrowed the lead once again. The GS for Vipers fell to the ground and suffered an injury.
This proved to be a huge blow to Vipers but they went on to win the second quarter 16-14. In the third quarter, Police seemed to be catching up as they continued narrowing the lead until they got on level terms with Vipers for the first time in the game with two sides’ score standing at 17-17.
Vipers reclaimed the lead once gain to lead by 19 goals to 17 but that was still not enough as Police still got on level terms and the quarter ended in a stalemate.
It was a do or die in the last quarter for the both teams to see who comes out strong between the two.
However after a tight affair, Vipers found the winning goal on the last seconds and won the game by 25-24. Topo Basaako, Southern Zone League Committee Treasurer, said the tournament turned out to be a success as they got to raise some funds for the charity events.
“Yesterday’s tournament was a success because we managed to have teams come and play for a purpose.