A Week of Football

The Suba Lakers Football Club took three teams to Sindo this week to participate in a local tournament. They took a secondary school ladies team, a primary school ladies team, and a secondary school boys team for the first time.

The boys were all secondary students that are associated with Christ's Gift Academy. We felt like it was a good opportunity to keep them busy during the holidays and make productive use of their time. There are many talented boys that graduated from CGA so it was easy to put together a competitive team. Their team was captained by Festus Ochieng and Denis Omondi. They trained for a week before the tournament, but started slowly with a 3-0 loss to previous champions Olando. The next day they came back strong holding Roo to a 0-0 draw but were unable to advance to the knockout stages. It was a good beginning and hopefully it will continue to strengthen over time.

The girls trained for a couple of days before the Sindo Tournament. The talented secondary girls were shocked when their primary school counterparts blasted them 4-0 in a scrimmage. Our young girls have really improved as individual players and have bonded as a team throughout the monthly trainings this year. As we had predicted, there wasn't much competition from other local ladies teams. Both teams breezed through the competition without a loss, routing most of their opponents. The tournament organizers allowed us to face a junior boys team in the final. So we combined our two teams to face the boys. These boys weren't "juniors" though. They were big and fast, probably the same age as most of our girls, or older. The stadium was filled to capacity and the fans had never seen a match pitting girls against boys in football. Very quickly the spectators jumped on our bandwagon, amazed to see the girls take the ball from the boys and dribble around them. The girls fought hard throughout the first half which remained scoreless. In the opening minutes of the 2nd half Pauline Aoko controlled a cross and fired a hot shot that bounced off the goal post and Caren Akeyo missed the rebound shot. The crowd was shocked that the girls almost moved ahead of the boys. In the end, strength and speed won out as the boys scored two 2nd half goals. But it was a great exhibition and opened the eyes of many people around the area as to how strong girls can play football. It was also a good test for our girls to increase their strength, speed and toughness.

So our two teams received prizes as the champions and runners-up. It was a good week, but challenging. Driving back and forth to Sindo for five days with 30-40 players, taking care of their lunches and other needs. We would meet at CGA early each morning to distribute uniforms and talk with the players, then we would arrive back after dark each night and try to get all the players to their homes where they were staying. But it was good preparation.

The girls will be returning this week on Thursday for two days of training and then we leave on Saturday for a strong 2-day tournament in Kisii against some higher level ladies competition before taking a break for the holiday season.