The Free State Department of Sport, Arts, Culture and Recreation, under the leadership of MEC D.A.M. Kgothule, has embarked on a programme to establish Local Talent Development and District High Performance Centers (LTDC and DHPC) across the province. The primary objective of these centers is, by implication, to identify local sport talent in various localities and ensure that this talent is developed along the sport continuum.
This programme has started to bear visible results as epitomised by one of the identified local talent in the form of an 18-year-old boxer from Thabong (Welkom), Lerato Dlamini, who won a gold medal during the bi-annual Zone VI games in Lusaka in December. Dlamini is the newly crowned zone VI champion in the lightweight division following his intensive training at one of the department’s LTDC and DHPC located in Thabong.
Through his sterling performance at the zone VI games Dlamini has put the Free State on the map.
The department has also developed a programme for the development of boxing in the Free State to ensure that such talent in this sporting code as exhibited by Dlamini in Lusaka does not go to waste but is escalated to the highest level of competitiveness in the sport continuum.
As part of realising this objective, MEC Kgothule officially launched the Free State Boxing League in February 2012 to revive, promote and elevate boxing in the various communities in the province.
The department, through this initiative, envisages organising a provincial amateur boxing league that will be tasked with providing the necessary capacity to empower athletes, administrators and technical officials to maintain the highest ethics and standards of professionalism in the sport of boxing throughout the province.
The department’s quest at implementing such a sport infrastructure program is based on the concern that many young people in our communities are not able to develop their talents in sports due to the absence or inadequacy of sport facilities in their communities. This is to ensure that sport loving young people and aspiring athletes are offered an opportunity to develop their talents and therefore excel in whatever sports activities they are involved or intend getting involved in.
Without sport facilities and, therefore, engagement in sport as a meaningful activity, a lot of social deviances pervade in our communities. As we know an idle mind is a devil’s workshop. We know that to produce excellent sports athletes takes years of training and guidance and that talented athletes should be identified form an early age. With sport being what it is today, a social and economic developmental enterprise, and these facilities should enable us to identify talent for nurturing at other levels and thus creating further opportunities for the youth to position themselves well in the social and economic developmental trajectory of our society. It is the departments mission to help take young people of the streets where they are exposed to peer pressure, drug abuse, crime and gangsterism and provide them with healthy activities that not only strengthen their abilities, but show them that there is alternatives available.
In relation to these developments, the department will also provide communities with facilities over and above the High Performance Centers. MEC Kgothule will hand over a Boxing ring and equipment to the Odendaalsrus community on 16 June 2013. This will be in an effort to promote boxing as a viable sport option to the community.
The handing over of this boxing facility will take place as follows:
Date: 16 June 2013
Time: 11h00
Venue: AME Church, Kutlwanong
Enquiries:
Tankiso Zola, Manager: Communication and IT
Cell: 082 940 2392
Tel: 051 410 4742 /4786/4719
E-mail: tankiso@sacr.fs.gov.za
