Kuz host junior tourney

The tournament is targeting junior fighters from the age of 8 to 18 and will be their first event of the year.
The union will this year hold the junior and senior tournaments separately in an effort to give the participants enough time to showcase their talent.

Kuz committee member, Kumbirai Musinami, said they want to promote the development of junior fighters.
“This is specifically for juniors from the age of eight to 18.
“What we have decided to do is to try and dedicate the tournament to the juniors for development.

“When we combine tournaments the juniors get a minute for a fight while the seniors get three minutes.
“The drive is that when we hold combined tournaments the time is not enough and mostly juniors suffer at the expense of seniors.
“We want to try and give enough time such that we get enough time for them to display their abilities.

“This will also give us enough time to identify talented junior fighters for regional and international events,” said Musinami.
Musinami said holding the senior and junior tournaments separately will give them a platform to identify more talented fighters that will represent the country at regional and international level.

“Basically for our athletes to develop into regional and international events we need to develop a bigger team.
“Last year we were represented in Kazakhstan but there were a few fighters, we would be happier if we have a bigger team because some times if we have a smaller team it means we cannot compete in all regional and international events.

“But if we have a bigger team we can select who is going to take part in a particular event. We are inviting everyone who feels they can take full contact. We are starting registration next week and we have already started sending out invitations for the tournament.

“We are expecting quite a lot of fighters because last year when we held the tournament in Budiriro we had 200 participants, including the seniors, but this year it’s for the juniors only and we expecting 100 to 120 fighters,” said Musinami.

Musinami noted that they have a busy schedule ahead of them with a number of local and international events lined up for this year for both seniors and juniors.