OPEIFA CUP: 100 students for handball clinic

ABOUT 100 students will be selected for a handball clinic in Lagos State from over 1000 students that participated at the 2^nd edition of the Opeifa Cup Lagos Secondary Schools Handball Championship.

This was disclosed to SportingLife by sponsor of the tournament, Comrade Kayode Opiefa, the immediate past Commissioner for Transportation in Lagos State at the end of the week-long event held at the Rowe Park Sports Centre, Yaba.

“One of the things we plan is that the four winners are getting handball goal posts with net and balls, we are also going to create a ten minutes documentary on this completion and make sure all the 92 teams that came for the competition have at least a goal post in their school.

“We also plan that before the next school resumption we will organize a clinic in Lagos where we have 50 male and 50 female selected from these over 1000 students and try and improve their skills. Don't forget that Lagos is the current champion at the sports festival level for the men and in the women we are runners up, we hope we can still do some more work on them to bring out the best in them. I can assure you from these players we have some of the players that will represent the country at the 2020 Olympics.

Speaking on other plans to develop handball in the state, Comrade Opeifa said, “We are looking at the National stadium, there is a handball court there that is underutilized and we would see how can take advantage. We are also looking at a possible place within Agege Stadium, maybe the basketball court.  We are also looking at NYSC camp in Agege. We are also planning to move to Ikeja Cantonment, we learnt command secondary school also has spaces so that we can to nurture the students.

“A lot of things are in the pipeline, but it’s not about one person we are all going to come together. We also have another championship at the national level where we would expose some of these talents,” he said.

While commending the sponsor for his commitment, the Chairman, Lagos State Handball Association, Adeola Opeifa said players that will represent the state at various competitions will be selected from this year’s edition of the Opeifa Cup.

 “Most of those we picked from Ibile Games represented us in a competition among six states in Abeokuta in February and Lagos State won the competition. So we will definitely be selecting the best from this edition of the Opeifa Cup into our state team,” she said.