Schools are a strong backbone for sports federations and associations’ building of strong national teams and their vigorous involvement in as many sports disciplines as possible, creates a bigger chance for different sports federations to tap talents and build on them.

This is what Uganda Secondary Schools Sports Associations (USSSA) is trying to do, by enlarging the competition base so as to give the different young talents in different sports a chance for exposure and development.

And at this year’s edition of the USSSA Ball Games due August 13-22 at Dr Obote Boroboro and St Katherine Girls, both in Lira City, five new disciplines will be competed for for the first time in the games’ history and they are woodball, dancesport, Basketball 3x3, girls rugby 7s and girls U16 football competitions.

“As Uganda Woodball Federation, we are delighted to have achieved this milestone of seeing Woodball added to the USSSA spectrum of competitive ball games. We are sure that this sport will display the best quality of competition and appeal to Ugandan schools to embrace it for purposes of sports diversity,” said Julius Agaba Kabisha the UWbF administrator.

Woodball was a demonstration item on the 2019 USSSA Ball Games II while dancesport which is riding high in just in a couple of years since its introduction, staged demonstration activities in the USSSA Fresh Diary 2022 Games in Gulu in April.       

Uganda has also done well in the recent past International Schools Sports Federation (ISF) competitions in basketball 3x3, the reason USSSA thought of adding it to the menu.

For rugby 7s, it’s only been for boys, with the girls having only been added this year starting with the rugby 15s in Gulu, while the girls U16 football is coming in the second year after the introduction of the boys’ competition in the last event in Soroti in 2019.

The five now are added to athletics (competed for by districts), netball, volleyball (boys and girls) and handball also for boys and girls.

From the USSSA slots allocation for the 19 zones across the country, 80 netball teams, 96 football U-16, 134 volleyball (68 boys, 66 girls), 114 handball (56 boys,58 girls), 114 basketball (57 boys, 57 girls) with a maximum of 24 teams each in boys and girls rugby 7s, woodball and dancesport will compete for honours in Lira.