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Ellina Mhlanga Sports Reporter
FOLLOWING the participation of their athletes at the just-ended World Senior Individuals and Teams Championships in Hungary, the Judo Association of Zimbabwe are shifting focus to the local scene with a tournament lined up for this weekend in Harare.

JAZ will host the national championships in Epworth on Sunday where they recently opened a branch. This will be the second event under the Smart Deke-led executive.

Participants will take part in different weight division, from 60kg to over 100kg for men, and for women it will be from 44kg to 100kg plus as well. Deke said they are looking at promoting and educating people about the sport that is still to grow in other provinces.

“For us putting it (the tournament) in Epworth is because we just opened a branch there. We also want to have a strategy of marketing the sport in Epworth so that people in that area will also have more understanding of the sport.

“When it comes to martial arts everyone just has an impression that maybe it’s just about fighting but especially for judo it’s a sport more than that. It’s a sport that we are taking the world over for education. So we really want to educate the people.

“Our sport is still small and we are yet to try and spread our wings all over Zimbabwe. We are expecting to have a number of 60 to 70 athletes that are going to come and participate. And we have got all categories for men and women,” said Deke.

The JAZ president admitted that while they are looking forward to Sunday’s event, they still have a long way to go in establishing the sport and active structures in other provinces.

However, the national association are beginning to make in-roads in Mashonaland West, Norton in particular. And some of the provinces on their programme for this year include Mashonaland Central, Bulawayo and Mutare.

“As a new executive, we are looking at about a thousand athletes. If we manage to spread our wings to the 10 provinces in Zimbabwe we will be able to have, maybe, 1 000 athletes. “This will give us very good and strong competition that will help us to prepare actually for other international events because we were very small.

“And we were having challenges where we could have a champion who will be coming out of maybe six or seven athletes, then that person will be a champion in Zimbabwe. ‘’But if we can have a big number of participants this will increase the competition level and we will come up with very strong athletes,’’ said Deke.

Some of the athletes expected to compete on Sunday include Tapiwa Pavari and Brian Chiminya, who are just coming from the World Championships.