Kirsty Coventry Named the Sports Minister!



By Perkins Bare

Kirsty Coventry has been appointed the new Minister of Sports, Arts and Youth  in a move that could possibly change Zimbabwean Sports for the good. The 34-year old Olympiad has been named in a new cabinet announced by His Excellency CDE ED Mnangagwa at the State House later this afternoon, Hon Kirsty was named new Minister of Sports Arts and Youths.

The main reason why this was a formidable appointment in my view is because Kirsty Coventry is someone who is already on the ground getting her hands dirty and this is just but a title for she has been working to try and bring change already.  She is a member of the ANOCA Athlete's Commission, Vice-President of the Zimbabwe Olympic Committee and provides coaching and swimming lessons at her non-profit organization, the Kirsty Coventry Academy, and has recently launched a program for low-income and underserved areas - HEROES: Empowering children through sport.

Heroes is a community-based program that was launched in 2017 to leverage the power of sport as an effective method for tackling these issues and they provide free sporting activities to children in underserved areas of Zimbabwe by utilizing existing schools, Sports Centres, fields, and volunteer coaches from within these communities.

Apart from that she chairs the IOC`s Athletes Committee and she was recently in Switzerland discussing the possibility of bringing the Youth Olympic Games to Africa in 2022. The evaluation consisted of 4 bidding countries: Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia and if it eventually goes through it will be a huge honor to see the Olympics finally come to Africa. She was named as part of the evaluative team for the 2024 Olympics as the chair of the IOC Athletes Commission and it`ll be interesting to see how she balances those two great roles and that is my biggest worry before we get all too excited. 

But Zimbabwean Sport has never been in a good state for a long while and what has held up were the elite sports who also recently started to latch onto the dismal trend going on in the country. First up in the casualty ward we have Zimbabwe Cricket who missed out on a chance to qualify for the 2019 World Cup in England on home soil which and is at an all time low but still keeping the same old duds who drove them into that mess. Recently Zimbabwe Cricket announced Givemore Makoni as the acting chairman. Most of the players like Sikander Raza still have to be convinced to come back and play national cricket as he`s now become a T20 specialist.

Then next up we have Zimbabwe Rugby which still doesn`t have a national league in place which has surprisingly turned out well for the players as it has forced the players to get more playing time from some clubs in Europe. Now we have Shayne Makombe playing in France whilst Farai Mudariki is playing in Worcester England. But we still need to have a solid league structure so that we maintain the talent that is coming out of the schools and stop losing it out to academies in South Africa and other countries abroad. Not that it’s a bad thing the problem is that it then takes nothing but sheer patriotism to maintain the real talent and the same problem lies with the athletes as apart from the Youth Games we still don`t have a proper athletics calender where they get to meet and compete regularly which most athletes have been complaining about.

The same also lies with tennis but that is a different case as we recently had the ITF F1 Future tournament where Zimbabwean Benjamin Lock won the singles tourney whilst they scooped the men`s doubles together with his brother Courtney Lock. Its therefore talent and training which takes the athletes the furthest in their venture but the training has become so scientifically oriented that it takes a lot of investment to have quality training for the athletes.

It may be true that we will not be able to produce the next Kevin Anderson in the next quinquennat but as an Olympiad Kirsty should be able to produce some results as most of the problems we have are rather organizational which is why we struggle with the basics like just keeping a national league running. On the other hand there`s still a lot of cleaning up to do even at 53 Livingstone House where the Warriors are about to kick-start their Afcon qualifiers against Congo this Sunday.

Follow @perkinstinobare

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