adminNgqabutho Moyo Sports Reporter
THE Zimbabwe Volleyball Association has set a budget of $47,000 for the All-Africa Games qualifiers. They hope to use the money for the Olympic Games qualifiers too.
ZVA president Frederick Ndlovu said in 2014 they were able to send teams to international events. He said they are looking forward to raising more money to enable them to send more teams to international competitions.
This came out at the association’s annual general meeting held in Harare at the weekend.
“We are very happy with the progress we made in 2014. We managed to send volleyball teams to represent Zimbabwe in international events, something which is very difficult to achieve especially when you are operating on a stringent budget.
“We managed to raise money to send Under-21 and Under-23 teams to World Championship qualifiers in Mozambique but unfortunately failed to raise funds to send them to play in the championships,” said Ndlovu.
The championships were staged in Poland.
Ndlovu said this year they are hoping to raise money to send all the volleyball teams to a number of international events and expand volleyball participation in the country.
“This year our main objectives are to try and send our teams to all international events and grow our sport especially by starting a junior policy targeting mainly schools and universities,” he said.
ZVA appointed five chairpersons of commissions into the board of administration in a bid to share and improve the growth of the sport.
The five members appointed to share duties with the executive are Tawanda Sithole (athletes commissioner), Leonard Gaize (referees), Elliot Mupariwa (beach volleyball), Perpetua Masarira (Nash) and George Chiwurawa (Naph).
Ndlovu said Zimbabwe now has the highest number of internationally qualified referees in the region and will take advantage of them in training more.
“Zimbabwe has the highest number of qualified referees in the region and we are going to try and use them in training more referees in a move meant to improve the standard of volleyball in the country,” said Ndlovu.
He expressed concerns over the delay of the national teams in preparing for the All-Africa Games and Olympic qualifiers. “Lack of funds has greatly affected the national teams’ preparations for the All-Africa Games and Olympic qualifiers, we feel that if the situation continues like this our teams will not be well prepared for the qualifiers,” he said.
ZVA has reduced club and players’ affiliation fees in a bid to encourage more clubs to join the National League. Ndlovu said there are too many international events on this year’s calendar and will be relying on government assistance in getting the teams to these events with the first being the senior World Beach Volleyball Championship qualifiers on February 14-22 in Algeria.
Online Reporter