27 Apr 2017

The Southern Region Football Association (SOFA) official Thapelo Lekaba has encouraged stakeholders in his area to support grassroots soccer development and enable talented youth to earn a living through talent.     
In an interview, Lekaba argued  that supporting the youth development initiative  would help identify, nurture and mould talented young ball players into future national stars.
He said the initiative targeted  boys and girls from the  ages of nine up to 17 years which he described as a critical stage of development.

 He said his region had five centres being Kanye, Lobatse, Goodhope, Jwaneng and Moshupa each with under 13,15 and 17 teams  for both genders.
Lekaba explained that the spirit of the initiative was to afford boys and girls access to development  without being taken advantage of by soccer academies.   He raised concern that some academies charged a lot of money for their services while others sometimes travelled outside the country with players without consent from Botswana Football Association(BFA) but expected BFA to answer if anything went wrong.

With the initiative, he said BFA wanted to track and manage the development  of players and expose them to a league system from a tender age.
Further, Lekaba noted that the initiative would have two phases being  the league and regional squads and explained that the leagues would run in a similar pattern as the top flight league and culminate with the formation of block squads.    
For his part, SOFA regional youth development coordinator Nicholas Moupanaga said his organisation faced challenges as a result of failure by some teams to pay affiliation fees.
Moupanaga said they also  had a challenge  of getting referees  to officiate during league games but promised to address the matter in due course. He said most of the referees came from Lobatse and commended the centre for running efficiently. ENDS