By SHAMAOMA MUSONDA –
IN a bid to popularise squash among the youth, the Zambia Squash Association (ZSA) has decided to take the sport to schools across the country.
After retaining her post for a second two-year term at the weekend, ZSA president Norena Chiteba said the association wanted to capture the players while they were still young and that getting them from schools was the best way.
Chiteba said ZSA would work tirelessly in seeing this dream becoming a reality.
“In our junior development programme, we are looking at getting to bring in more kids to the game and we want to get to the schools. This is ambitious but we have already made a stride by getting one school to add squash to its extra-curricular activities,” she said.
Squash has largely been considered as an expensive sport mainly because of the few facilities where the game is played.
Because the squash facilities are not easily assessable, there has been little attraction for players to join the sport compared to other disciplines like football and athletics.
Additionally, it is hard to find a school that has a squash court.
But this has not deterred the Chiteba executive which has now embarked on a programme to get more schools into the game and identifying coaches to help out the new players to the game.
Among the strategies will be to get the pupils to squash clubs at weekends under the guidance of trained coaches.
