10th National Girls’ Festival

May 27

10th National Girls’ Festival

By Victor Shakineza Gauteng Add comments

The idea for this festival came from a very well known lady in the Education world, Mrs A Kitto, who was Headmistress of Pretoria High School for Girls from1996 – 2003. At the time, there were many individual tournaments for the different sports but nothing that incorporated all the sports at one event and so Mrs Kitto suggested the idea of the festival and it was immediately welcomed by all. The aim of the festival is for a different all girls’ school to host the event every year at the end of April, beginning May and to include as many sporting codes as possible. Public all Girls’ schools from around the country are invited to partake in this festival.

The Festival has been successfully run for 10 ten years now and it was the second time that Pretoria High School for Girls hosted this festival. Basketball is not always included every year because not many schools have the facilities or even offer the sport at their schools. I do believe that this was only the second time basketball has been included, the first time being when PHSG hosted for the first time.

3 schools from Natal, Northlands High, Durban Girls and Danville Park, participated in basketball this year and to make up numbers we invited two Pretoria schools to participate, The Glen and Rosina Sedibane. Although the festival ran for 3 days, the basketball round robin was played over two days.

The Pretoria schools were eager to see how they would fair against the Natal schools. It was soon to become clear that Pretoria proved to be a lot stronger than they thought and Natal were struggling to beat us. Danville proved to be the strongest of the Natal schools, putting up a good fight in every game under the leadership of a coach who is passionate about basketball and this passion is definitely instilled in his players. I would like to make special mention of Northlands. Their coach was unable to accompany them but this did not stop them from playing their hearts out in every game. They kept their spirits high and always tried their best despite having to coach themselves, it was amazing to see! A great sense of Basketball spirit was built over those two days and the players gained great game experience and had a lot of fun, which to me was most important. Seeing the players smiling and enjoying themselves was confirmation that this was indeed a successful festival.

The final results for Basketball in 2009 were as follows:

1^st: Pretoria High School for Girls

2^nd: Rosina Sedibane

3^rd: Danville Park

4^th: The Glen High School

5^th: Northlands

6^th: Durban Girls’ High

Article by Rosemary Leak

In 2007 after getting frustrated at the lack of information about the game he loved in South Africa, Victor decided to start Mybasketball and he hasn't looked back. For close to 15 years, Victor has experienced the game as a player, a coach, a spectator and now from a media perspective. The whole purpose of Mybasketball is to keep the fans informed about the game and anything related to it; whether it is here in SA, Africa or Overseas. Victor has made some great friends along the way and rekindled some amazing friendships through the game.. Some of those friends have joined him on this crusade to make basketball better for everyone, and he looks forward to a South Africa where basketball gets the credit it deserves and the focus is on youth development and improving the coaches.