Harare Province preps for National athletics championships begin

championships will be used to select the provincial team that will compete in the National Championships scheduled for Plumtree next month.
Athletes will take part in track and field events in the Under-16, Under-18 and Under-20 age groups.
Harare Athletics Board secretary-general, Sailus Muringani, said they were expecting all the eight zones from Harare to take part in the event.
“We are expecting all the zones representing 97 percent of the Harare Secondary schools. Actually we are going to have one athlete competing per event.
“We have a new event called race walking while pole vault and hammer which were introduced last year will be running for the second year.
“This is in preparation for the national championships to be held in April and for our Under-18 and 20 it will also be part of preparations for the Southern Region Junior Championships to be held in Namibia from May 5 to 6.
“We are also hosting the Youth Championships in May and other Southern Africa countries are coming. Apart from that we are saying our juniors should also prepare for the World Championships scheduled for Barcelona, Spain. These competitions are by qualifying standards,” said Muringani.
Muringani said they expect to come up with the best team as they aim for glory in this year’s national championships.
“We have set standards for Harare, we are not going to take each and everyone who comes first, we are going to consider other things such as height.
“We hope to select 120 athletes for the track and field events and 24 for cross-country.
“However, we are not taking many athletes for cross country because what we are fighting for is gold, silver and bronze medals. We are concentrating on track and field events where we stand a chance of getting more medals.
“We hope to improve from what we did last year when we came eighth in the national championships. It has been so in previous Nash and national youth games competitions and us coming eighth in Bindura, definitely means something was wrong,” said Muringani. Muringani said this year they have also engaged private schools within Harare to be part of the provincial competition.
“Here in the province we have managed to line a number of private schools and we are impressed with the response, it has been quite positive,” said Muringani.