Sports Briefs
BUILDING on its already established track record of supporting Ghanaian footballers and relying on $50,000 that is now mostly secured for the project, Keerapa Active needs to match these funds with another $50,000 to offer Ghana’s aspiring football players who want to become professionals, the accessible and high-standard sports facility that they need to achieve this goal.
Ghana is an African country where sports play an extremely important role in the society. Tennis, basketball, hockey, athletics, and football (or soccer, as it is known in the US) are some of the many sports that Ghanaians love, both as fans and athletes. However, becoming a professional athlete in a country where opportunities to practice and improve sports skills are not as available as they should be, isn’t easy. Preparation needs to be backed by opportunity, after all, and that’s Keerapa Active’s mission: to add opportunity to preparation in order to allow aspiring Ghanaian athletes to have real chances of becoming great at what they want to do.
The social, economic and even cultural importance of sports cannot be overstated. That’s why they have an ancient history that dates back to the Classic Greek era. In our days in Ghana, the importance and impact of sports are tremendous but faced with an irony: everyone loves sports but only few have chances of doing something important in the field. The reason for this is that existing sports facilities in Ghana are mostly in bad shape, offering poor conditions to those wanting to use them, and the quality facilities are unaffordable to most people. Keerapa Active has been making a difference, though: by leveraging the existing quality facilities available and organizing special events to make access to these places become affordable, we have allowed many Ghanaian athletes to improve their skills by practicing in the right kind of environment that fosters these improvements.
That’s Keerapa Active’s motto. It has been under this motto that we have been working, and it was based on this principle that in March of this year we held a tournament to raise awareness about 5-a-side Football in Ghana. It was a huge success. Football players were thrilled, the audience was happy, and the unique social glue that football represents, to bring communities together, worked splendidly. In fact, this worked out so well, that we’re currently organising a new tournament to be held in September this year. If everyone needs to play, as we believe, then we will help everyone play and enjoy the games and sports activities that do wonders for our youth and for our society in general. The problem is that we do not have quality facilities of our own to make this happen…which is why we’re requesting you become part of the solution that we’re working to build.
In a nutshell, that’s what we want to do. Keerapa Active has developed a plan to create a network of high-quality sports and leisure facilities that will be affordable and available to Ghana’s communities of athletes, sports fans and enthusiasts. To bring even more inclusion and integration, we’ll also offer our facilities as welcoming places for recreational events where people can bond, have fun and share special moments together. In short, we want to create a sports recreational facility that is based on the principle of equal opportunities and which seeks to empower those who should not be barred from pursuing their sports dreams and careers due to limited financial resources.
The Keerapa Active facility will be created to offer, a football pitch built as an Astro Turf, with the possibility of also being used for other sports activities. Astro Turf is an all-weather, durable and synthetic surface which looks like natural grass but which offers a surface that is far more consistent, uniform and reliable than conventional grass fields; daily programmes of fun and competitive leagues and tournaments between football schools, along with other football development programs; Affordable payment plans to allow aspiring football players from all walks of life and resource-restrained football schools to have a real and accessible chance of using Keerapa Active’s facilities for practice, training and tournaments, and other sports schools, teams and athletes the chance of gaining access to Keerapa Active’s facilities in affordable conditions, so that they too can improve the skills of their athletes in a professional level environment.
The facility will be built in Sogakope, the capital of Ghana’s South Tongu district, and it will be designed to become a self-sustainable operation that is also a generator of funding to develop a nationwide network of Keerapa Active’s similar facilities.
– Aug. 7, 2018 @ 16:35 GMT |
Tags: Keerapa Active: Empowering Athletes in Africa
