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CREME DE LA CREME . . . Members of the Baker’s Inn netball team of Harare proudly display their medals after beating Irvines in the final of this year’s Innscor Wellness tournament at Barclays Sports Club in Harare on Saturday. — Picture by Bongani Kumbula.

Sports Reporter
IT was all play and no work for thousands of Innscor Africa Limited workers who thronged Barclays Sports Club in Harare on Saturday for their annual Wellness sports tournament.

The Wellness tournament is an annual event, now in its fourth year, which brings employees from Innscor companies from all over the country together in a social setting to observe and celebrate Innscor Group’s pride and corporate identity as well as foster team spirit.

The event also provides an environment for Innscor to reinforce its commitment to the health and wellness of its employees as the company provide free screening for HIV, blood sugar and blood pressure as well as raise cancer awareness, according to the Innscor Group Corporate Affairs Executive, Musekiwa Kumbula.

The event is getting bigger each year and on Saturday, it attracted more than 3 000 employees at Barclays Sports Club in the Mount Pleasant area of Harare.

The more than 3 000 employees from the fast-foods company, who were drawn from Bulawayo, Mutare, Victoria Falls and Harare, took part in this one-day tournament which featured 20 men’s soccer teams and 13 women’s netball sides who battled it out for the top honours in the two sporting disciplines. The men’s soccer teams and women’s netball sides came from Irvines, Chicken Inn, Baker’s Inn, Colcom, Capri, National Foods, Natpak, Shearwater and Padenga which are all part of the Innscor group of companies.

All matches were played in a round-robin basis which culminated in the men’s soccer final as well as the women’s netball final. The men’s soccer final featured Norton-based Triple C Colcom and Innscor Distribution from Harare and the former side were crowned this year’s champions after edging out their opponents 1-0, thanks to a first-half penalty scored by Joseph Masanjala, in an exciting match.

For their efforts, “the pork boys”, Triple C Colcom, received a floating trophy and medals while the losing finalists Innscor Distribution, who were under the guidance of former CAPS United and Zimbabwe Saints bustling striker Simon Dambaza walked away with some medals.

Harare Harare’s Baker’s Inn emulated Triple C Colcom by lifting the women’s netball title after beating Irvines in the final. Before the soccer and netball finals, the fun-filled day saw a number of Innscor’s directors taking part in a soccer penalty shoot-out competition which was won by Simba Muchatukwa, the Capri financial director, who received a bottle of whisky.

Other directors who took part in this penalty shoot-out competition included Baker’s Inn’s Ngoni Mazango, Mike Fowler from Padenga, Capri’s Gary Watson, the chief executive of the Innscor Distribution Group Craig Hodgson, Innscor’s financial director Godfrey Gwarinda, National Foods’ Liberty Murimwa and Colcom’s human resources director Zvitendo Matsika.

Kumbula said this year’s event was a great success and they were looking at staging it again next year.

“I think this event is getting more and more popular among our employees. In fact, when we started it three years ago, it only featured a men’s soccer tournament but for this year, there was women’s netball after our female employees complained that they were being left out of this tournament.,” Kumbula said.