Given a chance to shine and qualify at the African Women Netball Championship qualifiers’ tournament which is also the World Cup qualifiers, Botswana women’s team’s hope of qualifying seems to have fallen apart.
Botswana Netball Association (BONA) Vice President Technical Lorato Thebekgosi says the games have been a learning curve for the ladies. “These games have benefited our players in several ways especially that some of them are from the under 21 national team. It has been quite an experience for the ladies to associate with players who have played international games, hence giving them experience to grow as players,” she said.
Moreover, Thebekgosi further said retaining the team will not be easy as “they will need to meet consistently as a team for training,” adding that she hopes to gather enough resources for the team to train together and play more games.
“We have realised that they need more game time especially with our league not running regularly. The team learnt quite a lot of lessons from the games, just that our teams in Southern Africa are not that much physical and they do not know that they should be mentally strong when they meet other teams,” she added.
She also stressed that the mood is high looking at the fact that we won against Kenya. “The first game we lost stressed everyone. As for the second game against Zimbabwe, we feel we did not play according to our plan, but against Malawi and Uganda our players were playing very well and it was just unfortunate that we lost,” she said.
Thebekgosi said the team did averagely well compared to the other years because those teams used to win against Botswana with a huge margin. She added that the way forward is to keep the team together, work very hard on mistakes, beef up the team as well as scout for talent which is abundant in Botswana.
