Red Sparrow founder sparks handball revolution in ...

Red Sparrow founder sparks handball revolution in rural Mashava

Patience Muchemwa

Red Sparrow handball club founder, Forward Chaibva, thought of introducing the game in the deep rural areas of Mashava.

The 28-year-old Mashava young man was born in Harare in 1995 as the second born in a family of four.

Chaibva, who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Media and Cultural Studies, was raised by a single mother, together with his siblings.

Chaibva started his handball career in 2013 and by 2014, was thinking of becoming a coach after noticing that there was no handball in Mashava.

“There was no handball in my area and I had been a handball player for a year so, I thought of introducing it so that I might have people to play with.”

For long, when young boys and girls leave high school in Mashava, they turn to be drug abusers, artisanal miners, robbers and commercial sex workers, so, Chaibva introduced handball as a way of keeping busy all the time.

“I believed introducing handball to children who just left high school, that is Form Four and Form Six who do not have the opportunity to proceed to tertiary institutions was the best way of keeping them busy. So, we wanted to create the first-ever community handball club in Mashava.”

Chaibva is recruiting players from surrounding schools such as Bere and Temeraire high schools.

Red Sparrows played in the league in 2019 but unfortunately, Covid-19 came and they could not continue.

“We failed to continue with the league because some of my players were impregnated during the Covid-19 lockdown because we had nothing to give them or to keep them busy.

“We started to recruit again in 2022 because we lost a number of players, some lost their parents and moved out of the community, some travelled to look for greener pastures, some are gold panners and some are now married,” Chaibva said.

In 2023, Red Sparrows got accepted again into the Eastern Region Handball League.

Chaibva also introduced handball to local primary and secondary schools around the Mashava area.

“We introduced handball to almost 60% of the local primary schools and they are winning some zonal competitions and also the high schools winning the zonal competitions.”

Chaibva is facing some challenges in running his Red Sparrow Handball Club as the founder and the coach.

“We were supposed to go and play the club championship in Bulawayo but some of our sponsors declined so we failed to make it, we are appealing to the public for sponsorship to run the club.

“Sometimes, he got the money to fund the games and buy refreshments for the players from my mother.”

Since Red Sparrows are working with schools, sometimes they were offered school grounds to play their games.

Chaibva praised Masvingo State and Devolution Minister Ezra Chadzamira for helping him through building his team.

“State Minister Chadzamira assisted me to register our club for the first league in 2019.

“He once carried us with his car when we went for the championship games, there were trials for the Zim Select.”

Chaibva’s wish is to build professional handball players but the journey is difficult without reliable sponsorship because right now, they depend on community sponsorship.

Sometimes, they fail to provide for the games.

Red Sparrows has more than 60 members, which includes the ladies teams, the juniors and the senior boys.

Chaibva said for someone to be a successful handball player, he/she should be disciplined and should always listen to the coach.

Chaibva is a very busy man, he always tries hard to balance handball, church, school and work.

“I balance my life well because I can’t go a day without watching or thinking about handball, I go to work, I do school, I do church and also training so, I balance all those things.”