Namibia’s 3×3 wheelchair basketball team on Saturday won its opening match 8-2 against Rwanda at the 2022 Africa Commonwealth Games qualifiers underway in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The Africa Zone’s qualification tournament for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games 3×3 wheelchair basketball which is being held at the Vodacom Mandeville Indoor Sports Centre in Johannesburg has five men’s teams and two women’s teams competing to represent the zone in July next year.

The men’s category consists of Gambia, Kenya, Namibia, Rwanda and hosts South Africa, while in the women’s category only host South Africa and Kenya are competing for top honours.

In the opening match of the championships, Team Namibia fielded Ingo David, Termus Festus, and Kamenye Kapuma who found the game challenging in the opening minutes as Rwanda opened the scoring and forced Namibia into making errors.

But the game changed when team captain Roodly Gowaseb came in for Kapuma in the third minute and picked up the pace of the game.

Kapuma made his comeback as he replaced Festus in the fifth minute of the game. Namibia piled more pressure on their opponents who started making more unforced errors and they took a four-point lead in the seventh minute of the game.

After 10 minutes of action, Team Namibia took the win with an 8-2 score.

Team captain Gowaseb told Nampa after the match that this is their first international competition and they are going to take it one match at a time.

“We came here to compete and we currently cannot promise anything but our goal is to continue winning games at this competition,” he said.

Namibia’s next match will be against South Africa who beat Kenya 14-06 in the second game of the championships.

Source: The Namibian Press Agency