Netball teams must reapply to enter league

Feb 11, 2014

THE Uganda Netball Federation (UNF) head of technical Ruth Rwakabale has insisted that the four clubs of UPDF, Posta, KU and TLC will have to reapply to take part in the 2014 season

By David Namunyala

THE Uganda Netball Federation (UNF) head of technical Ruth Rwakabale has insisted that the four clubs of UPDF, Posta, KU and TLC will have to reapply to take part in the 2014 season as a way of paying for their misconduct.

The four teams failed to honour their final games of the 2013 league calendar that ended over the weekend at Namboole with no clear reasons forwarded to the federation.

Although the previous league season was earlier scheduled to end in December last year, this was not as planed following the invitation of the national team to the weeklong Six Nations Cup in Singapore.

Later, another week was spent in the local Inter-Forces Games hence slowing the federation’s programs.

“The league was intended to end in December but was delayed due to two programs that were also vital to the development of the sport and all the team managers were aware,” Rwakabale stated.

She added “All those teams apart from UCU and Mbarara who gave us their reasons of not taking part will have to reapply.”   

But reapplying is likely to cost UNF a stack of arguments following the remarks made by one of the affected club managers Rossetti Kaala from Posta yesterday.

After she discarded the statements made by the federation's technical chief, she says her team and others in the same bracket have all the right to play in the league without any form of reapplying.

"Sometimes they just want to make personal issues turn public. It's not written anywhere in the rules and neither is it in the constitution therefore they have no right to force us to reapply," Kaala stated.

She added that the issues of not being able to honour the remaining games is based on financial constraints and the same clubs including Posta late last year filed similar complaints asking UNF to end the league at that stage and name the winner basing on performance.

"We make budgets that ran until December and telling our bosses to extend their financial budgets for the same league to another year is not possible so we strongly appealed to the committee in charge to end the league last year but they refused," she added.

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