Uganda will have more representation at the ongoing 13^th edition of the African Games in Ghana after a three-man team from the Scrabble Association of Uganda (SAU) left for the games on Wednesday.

SAU president Nelson Kyagera led Uganda's self-sponsored top seeds; Edgar Odongkara, Richard Geria and Ivan Ssentongo, to the championships that will be contested by 13 countries. 

The President of the Pan African Scrabble Association (PANASA), Adekoyejo Adegbesan in conjunction with the host nation ensured the games were added to the menu of the 13^th edition games.

The championship will be contested on a two-tier arrangement of the English and French-speaking countries.

Host Ghana, Liberia, Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, South Africa, and Zambia will be fighting for honours in the English Scrabble event while Benin, Gabon, Togo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are battling for bragging rights in the French Scrabble event have entered the African Games-Open-Side-event. The event has over $2000 (sh8m) as prize money.

Addressing the press before the team left on Tuesday, March 12, Kyagera said that each country will be represented by six players (three men and three women) but that they could only take three due to financial constraints.

“We are sending our top seeds who achieved them through various qualifiers. We expect tough competition but Uganda is currently ranked second on the continent,” Kyagera noted.

“But we hope and have a lot of confidence that our top players are going to perform very well and we are very sure that we shall make a podium finish because Uganda Scrabble has improved tremendously in the last five years.

“We are working so hard to ensure that we have a ladies' team at the next international competition which is the East and Central Africa Championship in Botswana, next month,” Kyagera stated.

Captain Geria was also upbeat saying that they were well prepared having played over 70 games in the last three months.

“This is a tournament we believe we can win and we are only going to polish the small issues in Accra to make sure we deliver the result expected of us,” Geria said.

“We are carrying a heavy weight and we are hopeful that we will deliver to those expectations. The good thing is we have played all these players before and we know their strengths and weaknesses,” Geria noted.

“We have a strong feeling that one-on-one and as a team we can deliver a good result and there is precedent to that because we tend to play very well as a team and that’s how we managed bronze at the 2017 World Championship against all expectations and we need to build on that,” Geria stated.

Uganda’s seed one Odongkara said the team is aiming for gold because they have had enough preparations.

“I’m almost certain based on the team structures of the rest of the teams that are playing that we will do it. We have played a series of cage matches to prepare, games to flush out the weaknesses and to increase the overall strength because it is through training that someone develops match fitness,” Odongkara stated.

“This is a momentous occasion and we want to crown it with the best performance possible which is team gold, individual gold that is available for grabs, and surely nothing less short than that will be satisfactory to us. On my part, everything is in place for that to happen.”

Geria and Odongkara were the best-ranked players for Uganda the last time the team represented at the first edition of the PANASA President's Cup in Nigeria last August.