A significant bit of sporting history has been made today, as the National Council of Sports (NCS) received the Sir Tito Winy site from the Church of Uganda and handed it over to the UPDF Engineering Brigade for immediare development into the first ever National Sports Academy in Uganda.
This Sir Tito Winy site, a part of the cluster that will serve Hoima City Stadium during AFCON 2027, is set to be more than just the Shs 17.081bn training ground of the first phase of construction.
In the words of NCS Board Chairman Ambrose Tashobya, presiding over the handover ceremony in place of the Honourable Minister of State for Sports on the school premises in Hoima, this will be the most important of all the facilities that are being concurrently developed across the country at the moment.
NCS has acquired a chunk of 100 acres off the vast Sir Tito Winy expanse, and as confirmed by Chairman Tashobya and NCS General Secretary Dr Bernard Patrick Ogwel, government retains an appetite for more should the church be willing to allow for further acquisition.
Three floodlit grass pitches, one artifiicial turf, a running track, a multi purpose hall with changing rooms and other facilities, a power house, ICT installations, a parking lot and access roads, among others, will not only serve AFCON but later morph into a massive grooming ground and conveyor belt churning out world class athletes in football, rugby, track and field and other indoor and outdoor sports. It will also be a facility for training coaches and other technical support for athletes and teams.
Chairman Tashobya, himself a former national basketball player who is so passionate about the project he will take a hands-on approach to its development, spoke of setting up an education centre as part of the academy, but beseeched Sir Tito Winy Secondary School to work towards becoming a school of sports excelence themselves, bringing in promising youngsters from Hoima, Bunyoro and the rest of the country to feed into the academy.
The academy is a long-term legacy project of AFCON 2027, but of immediate priority is the training ground for the tournament itself, a task Lt. Col. Eng. Seku Kidemuka's team has committed to executing in six months, under the supervision of the Ministry of Works and Transport team which for this function was led by Eng. Henry Lubega. The AFCON Secretariat was represented by Dennis Kiberu (Infrastructure) and Hamzah Nsereko (Media and Operations).
The UPDF Engineering Brigade had for the same purpose received the Kadiba Stadium in Kampala the day before, and are already working on Kyambogo University and Makerere University (Namboole cluster), Boma Grounds and Masindi (Hoima City Stadium), as well as Lira University, Gulu University and Pece (Akii-Bua Olympic Stadium).