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The Gauteng wheelchair basketball team’s assistant coach, Wiseman Dlamini, is thrilled with the three nominations his team has earned for the 2017 Gauteng Sports Awards.
The awards ceremony will be held at the Silverstar Casino in Krugersdorp on October 1.
Dlamini said that, as residents and sportspeople from the province, they always looked forward to the awards.
Different divisions of the team were nominated. The Under-19 boys and girls teams will go against each other for the most promising team of the year award. Another nominee in this category is the Hlangabeza Primary Under-13 chess team.
The Under-23 team is nominated for the sports team of the year with a disability. The team has been nominated for the award on three previous occasions, but are yet to win.
“I hope one of our three teams that have been nominated gets an award this time around,” a hopeful Dlamini said.
Dlamini, who coaches on a part-time basis, is so passionate about the sport that he would love to do it full time, but cannot do so because of a lack of funds.
The 35-year-old praised the support they got from the players’ parents.
“The parents provide the players with money for all their needs since this is an amateur sport. They even come to watch them play,” he said.
Kwazi Kubheka, Warren Tefu, Ronald Nkomo and Steven Walgenbach represented the national Under-23 team at the Fazza International Wheelchair Basketball Tournament in Dubai.
In June, they played in the men’s Under-23 World Wheelchair Basketball Championship in Canada.
Walgenbach won a basketball scholarship to study in Texas in the US. The Ricoh Pumas player said he would love to coach the Under-23 basketball national team one day.
The players on the Gauteng team come from different schools, including Adelaide Tambo High School.
The school trended on social media this week after a video depicting violence against a pupil went viral on Twitter.
The video shows a 16-year-old girl, who suffers from epilepsy and bipolar disorder, being assaulted on a bus by a school staff member.
The girl was then dragged out of the bus and left helpless and alone on the side of the road.
