A Successful First Year of Basketball

December 15th, 2017, is a big day for our organization- especially the young ballers on our Bibi Mimi’s Girls’ Home basketball team! The team, officially known as J-MOND, will celebrate its one-year anniversary on Friday. To mark the occasion- as well as all of the hard work, accomplishments, and successes that the girls have had this year, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the inaugural season.

Sports are an extremely important part of childhood for many kids, and at Mainsprings we value sports as a way to keep our girls, staff, and students healthy and happy. Sports are also an important way to teach important life lessons about commitment, communication, cooperation, and discipline and they serve as a way to continue to mold young leaders. Basketball has long been a dream at Mainsprings, particularly so for our residential girls ever since we constructed basketball hoops and retrofitted them to our tennis court at the beginning of 2016. Since then, the girls have gone from learning the basics of dribbling a basketball in the girls’ home dining hall with volunteer Hannah Walter, to now producing some of the best young players in all of Mwanza region.

On December 15th, 2016, eighteen residential girls from Bibi Mimi’s Girls Home held their first official meeting to discuss adding basketball to the girls’ activities schedule. For roughly six months, the girls had been playing basketball on their new court and learning the basics of dribbling, passing, making layups, and playing defense. Exactly one year ago they decided to move from having a basketball “club” to creating an official basketball “team.” The girls created an exercise schedule, implemented team rules (attending and being on time to all practices, respecting each other, using good language, following rules, etc.), elected two captains (Vale and Getruda), and, most importantly, set goals for their young team.


The 2017 season- despite some challenges and painful losses at the beginning of the year- was a year full of accomplishments that the girls, and our whole community, should be proud of.  Some of these accomplishments include:

· Learning the fundamentals of basketball and learning what it means to be an athlete (teamwork, leadership, discipline, cooperation, respect)

· Setting a practice schedule, creating team rules, setting team goals, and playing dozens of games against the Joseph and Mary boys

· Competing in over 15 games in Mwanza

· Sending four girls- Vale, Nyamisi, Lau, and Neema- to a training camp at Orkeeswa Secondary School

· Sending the team’s assistant coach- Ms. Atamba- to the training camp at Orkeeswa Secondary School twice

While 2017 has been a great year for our fledgling basketball program, we fully expect 2018 to be even better. The girls and coaches have big hopes for the New Year. As a team, the girls have set the goal of being the top girls’ basketball team in Mwanza region in 2018, and in the top 10 best teams in the nation within five years.

Guest Blogger, Seth Diemond, is Mainsprings' COO in Tanzania and resident basketball fanatic.