The Botswana Dance Sport Association (BODANSA) is on the rise again. The association, which has seemed to have gone to the dogs over the past few years, seems to have awoken from its slumber and is now on the way to re-establishing itself in the echelons of local sport.
Fresh from hosting its first coaches’ course two weeks back, the association followed up with a leadership forum that was held over the past weekend.
Hot on the heels of the two, the association will now host a Scrutineering course the following weekend to help upgrade its judges.
ctivities by the association point to the in-house restructuring process that BODANSA has been undertaking to improve its fortunes and image.
“For starters, we as the association, felt that we had to take stock of ourselves and restructure. In the past, our executive committee has been very busy preparing and running competitions. In the process, we failed in other aspects of running dance sport as per our mandate,” Tshambane said.
According to Tshambane, this negligence by the executive committee made it hard for BODANSA to secure any sponsors and even more difficult to run the sport or even at times to conduct all competitions in their annual calendar year.
He says as such, the association’s leadership felt that they now have to have a clear “outline and purpose” if they are to make an impression to its affiliates, the public and stakeholders at large.
According to Tshambane, as part of the new structure, the association opted to have four vice presidents, among them Vice President Administration, Vice President Technical as well as Vice President Marketing.
He says the positions were made to ensure that all aspects needed to run the association successfully are fully met. Another aspect which the association changed, according to Tshambane is the way the executive committee is voted. He says under the new structure, voting for various committee positions will be held at different times.
“We want to ensure that there is continuity even if the executive committee is voted out. As such, we have agreed that some positions will be voted for in different general meetings, this is, if we have elections this year, we only vote for certain positions while the remaining will be voted for in the next general meeting. This is to ensure that any new incoming committee doesn’t work in a vacuum,” the BODANSA Vice President Marketing added.
On other issues, Tshambane says they are engaging potential sponsors to help the association to run its competitions according to the calendar.
“We would like to run as many competitions as possible but our financial status does not allow for such. The grants we get from the Botswana National Sports Council and the Department of Sports and Culture can only take us some distance but falls short,” Tshambane said.
He says lack of enough competitions is crippling the sport as dancers are left inactive for long periods of time and this also affects the selection of national teams. So far this year, the association has had only one competition, which was held in Gaborone early this year.
The second competition is scheduled for end of this month in Jwaneng, but the association still has to wait to see if they can secure the necessary funds to go ahead with it.
“Lack of competitions means now when we select our teams, we have to rely on the past year’s results as well as dancers’ histories. This then means new dancers, no matter how good, are likely to be sidelined,” the BODANSA Vice President Marketing said.
He, however, says looking into the year ahead, they are optimistic that things will get better as they will also be trying to start their grassroots development initiative.
