Basketball in Africa

By EMMA NSEKANABO

Three Rwandan basketball clubs; APR, UGB and AGF, have vowed to halt foreign conquest of the Gisembe Memorial tournament slated for this weekend. The three foreign clubs from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi will be arriving in the country to take part in the memorial event during the course of the week.

The Rwandan trio got engaged in the preliminary battle, where Espoir basketball club bowed out in the event that was designed to produce three qualifiers for the weekend event to be held at Amahoro courts.
After finishing top in the preliminaries on Sunday, APR’s Kenyan coach Cliff Owor said the team was in a good shape to win the two-day tournament.
“I have not encountered the clubs from the DRC as an APR coach, but I am confident we will fight on well. We will go into the tournament to win,” Owor said.
The army side players’ shooting was off during the preliminaries and Owor seem to have recognised the flaw. “We are going to work on accuracy in shooting in our training sessions before the weekend,” added the Kenyan coach, disclosing that his side will resume training today at Camp Kigali.
United Generation Basketball, UGB, coach Jean De Dieu Neziyimana has equally sounded confident ahead of the weekend event. “We will be facing tough teams both at home and outside, we will just play as a team,” he said, adding that the team will step up preparations today at Lycee de Kigali.
AGF is another side to represent Rwanda, but it seems to be having issues to sort out. Coach Prospel Mihigo sounds pessimistic regardless of their good performance in the preliminaries, where they eliminated Espoir. “We cannot speculate what will happen since the team is ill-facilitated. How can the whole team train with one ball?” he queried.