Curtains set to come down on week-long Talanta Hela tourney today

Nyeri,

Wednesday, November 22, 2023,

KNA by Samuel Maina

The week-long Talanta Hela under 19-football tourney will come to an end today with Sports CS Ababu Namwamba expected to attend the closing ceremony.

The tournament which kicked off on Wednesday last week at the Nyeri Moi Complex has brought in a total of 20 teams (both girls and boys) from 18 counties.

The winners will be announced after four teams from the Uasin Gishu, Nakuru, Homa Bay and Kirinyaga counties are expected to fight it out for the final trophy in both boys’ and girls’ teams.

Kenya Academy of Sports’ (KACS) Doreen Odhiambo has termed the entire event a success and said they are hoping the initiative will help identify and nurture sportsmen and women to represent the country on the global scene.

She said the main objective of setting up the academy was to grow talents from the grassroots and develop them to become ambassadors for the country at the international scene.

“The main objective of setting up the Kenya Academy of Sports is to ensure that we have different sports representing us at the international scene. We’ve been depending on athletics and and volleyball and rugby but we believe that we have so many talents in different sports whose talents need to be nurtured and that’s why the Kenya Academy of Sports was started,” she told KNA.

Ms Adhiambo said the academy is working with a special technical team that often visits schools during sporting events in order to identify specific sporting talents among the learners.

 By August this year KACS had identified at least 2,000 disciplines from football to basketball who are being trained and equipped with specialized training in order to come up with a formidable sporting team for the future.

“Our work is identifying and developing talents and capacity building sports’ technical personnel and ensuring they are given the right training to enable them develop their talent well. We want to ensure Kenya Academy of Sports will be developing the junior team for the country. We are the ones who are supposed to get the team and feed it to the Federation (Football Kenya Federation), she added.

Last week James Theuri,a Talent Development Officer at the Kenya Academy of Sports, told KNA the second stage of the football competition had brought together teams from 12 regions of the country that clinched second position during the first stage of the games that took place in August this year.

“From these teams we have a total of 10 boys’ teams and 10 girls’ teams that will play in a league of five teams each and produce the winners and the losers. The games will be played in the first five days and on the on the 6th day (November 21) the semi-finals and on the 7th day which is November 22, we play the finals,” said Theuri.

The first round of the playoffs produced 24 teams comprising 12 boys’ teams and 12 girls’ teams which directly qualified for the national round.

Theuri said that during this second round, they are hoping to pick eight top teams which form part of the 32 teams which will take part in the final round which will kick off on December 3 in Nairobi County.

“From this whole tournament we are going to pick the best four from each category;4 for boys and 4 for girls to join the 12 teams that were already selected after the August tournament and the number will come to 16 teams for boys and 16 teams for girls playing in that tournament and the best teams will play in the finals,” stated Theuri.

Courtesy ;KNA