Mariam Birungi breaking new grounds in Ugandan basketball
Mar 28, 2016
When the former Most Valuable Player retired from playing the game, she found yet another way to serve Ugandan basketball, as a referee
What happens when female basketball players in Uganda hang up their sneakers? Many just concentrate on their careers and marriages, and lose contact with the beautiful sport that was so famously invented by Dr. James Naismith in 1891.
Not Mariam Birungi. When the former Most Valuable Player retired from playing the game, she found yet another way to serve Ugandan basketball, as a referee. She is Uganda's first International Basketball Federation (FIBA) Africa female Zone five referee, and has designs of becoming an international referee.
Today, she is the most high profile female referee in Uganda, and the local basketball federation trusts her abilities so much that she is assigned highly charged men's games, such as the finals of the National Basketball League.
So how does Birungi cope with the pressures of refereeing men's games? Find out her story in Her Vision in tomorrow's New Vision.