School Games | KSSSA Should Eradicate Age-Cheating in School Games

The Kenya Secondary Schools Sports Association (KSSSA) term one games – Basketball included, starts all around the country at zonal level, with teams squaring out to get provincial top honors and a ticket to Upper Hill High School Nairobi for the National Finals.

Big names in high school basketball, the likes of Maseno School (Nyanza Province), St Austin’s Academy (Nairobi Province), 2009 boys champions Laiser Hill Academy (Rift Valley Province), 2009 girls champions Shimba Hills (Coast Province), Friends School Kamusinga (Western Province); will be on-track to maintain their good run, while upcoming teams like Nairobi Jaffery’s Academy, Upper Hill School, and old foes comprising of Kisumu Boys, Aquinas High, Buru Buru Girls, St Mary’s School and Mombasa Baptist will be going all out to spoil the party.

However, despite much anticipated showdown and Brookeside Dairy Ltd’s extension of their several million shillings sponsorship of the games for another year, one aspect seems to haunt the games once more. That’s age-cheating. The fact that there are very few sports academies in Kenya, school games remain an important forum for developing talents. Organizers should put in place checks and measures to ensure the event is clean right from the grass roots to the regional level – the East Africa School Games.

KSSSA have put in place punitive measures to rid the games of cheating, which was rampant in yester-years, However, the KSSSA needs to go an extra mile and fully eradicate the vice. The most disappointing fact is that, some principals, teachers and coaches, who should be on the fore front to help stop cheating, collude to include outsiders in the school teams, or much worse, coerce students in repeating classes’ year-in-year-out, so as to play and win championships!

Where’s the pride in that! Especially when the “winning” team’s average age is 21 years and the losing team’s average is 16 years!

And don’t forget the most annoying aspect which is the “justification” the school authorities attempt to give yet they KNOW-that we- KNOW which school their “Star-player” was attending and cleared from THREE YEARS EARLIER!

Let’s make the KSSSA 2010 Sports Season worthwhile!

info: alsaBasketball: additional info/extract: The Standard Newspaper /
Photos: alsaINTERACTIVEMEDIA

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