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Kovsie Netball star selected to the national team

26 October 2018 Photo Gallo Images

Kovsie Netball Team centre and wing attack player Khanyisa Chawane’s glorious netball career has taken to greater heights after her recent selection into the national netball team.

The 22 year-old student final year Bachelor of Science (Geography and Agrometeorology) student hailed her selection as a new challenge in her sporting career.

Chawana has this week been in Australia for the Fast 5 netball series where they will be playing against Jamaica, Malawi, Australia, New Zealand and England on this coming Sunday and Monday.
A Fast 5 is a quick-paced netball game where contesting nations will select five players per side.

Testing her prowess with the best

Chawana has so far been capped three times in the Spar Proteas national netball team; those were for the Quad Series matches which the South African Spar Proteas played against Australia, New Zealand and England. The games were held in Australia last month.

“I was nervous at first, but I wanted to go out there and wanted to prove myself that I worked hard to be here,” she said adding that their opponents were playing a different game with speed and high intensity.

“After those games, I felt like I needed to prepare myself more so that I could handle the intensity as I was playing with ladies who have been capped many times and were more experienced,” she said.

Kovsie netball coach “inspired me to be the best”

Asked who has been a source of her inspiration in her netball career, Chawana spared no moment in attributing her rise to Kovsie Netball Team coach Burta De Kock.

She explained that from her late high school days when she was playing at provincial games in Limpopo, De Kock scouted her abilities and has been keeping an eye on her since then.

“When I was doing Grade 12, she approached me and said, ‘One day you will play in the National Netball Team.”

“When I first got the news of my selection, I exclaimed and said; Wow! Words do really come true, my coach Burta saw in me what I could not see and she prepared me for the best.”

She described her coach as a kind of a manager who individually nurtures the abilities of each and every single player for the best, “I am so grateful to her.”

Chawana blew off family blows

Last year, Chawana was dealt a devastating blow when her family home in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga was razed to the ground by fire, thereby losing all her possessions. Her father, Russel, also had to spend three weeks in the intensive care unit of a local hospital for smoke inhalation treatment.

“Having gone through all this, but for me, nothing picks me up more than a prayer. I felt that all this might have happened for a reason and it always aspired that something better will come up,” she said.

During the Varsity Cup National Netball Tournament finals played which the Kovsie Netball Team played against the University of Pretoria here, Chawana came out as the best player in the Premier League, National Championship and the Varsity Netball in the same year.

News Archive

Death may come in adorable little packages

2015-03-23

The main host of the Lassa virus is the Natal Mulimammate mouse.

Photo: Supplied

Postdoctoral researcher, Abdon Atangana, of the Institute for Groundwater Studies at the university recently published an article online about the Lassa Haemorrhagic fever in the Natural Computing Applications Forum. In addition to the terminal transmissible sickness recognised as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, there is another strain called Lassa haemorrhagic fever.

The disease is classified under the arenaviridae virus family. The first outbreaks of the disease were observed in Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic. However, it was first described in 1969 in the town of Lassa, in Borno State, Nigeria.

The main host of the Lassa virus is the Natal Mulimammate mouse, an animal indigenous to most of Sub-Saharan Africa. The contamination in humans characteristically takes place through exposure to animal excrement through the respiratory or gastrointestinal tracts.

Mouthfuls of air containing tiny particle of infective material are understood to be the most noteworthy way of exposure. It is also possible to acquire the infection through broken skin or mucous membranes that are directly exposed to the infective material.

“The aim of my research was to propose a novel mathematical equation used to describe the spread of the illness amongst pregnant women in West Africa. To achieve this, I used my newly-proposed derivative with fractional order called beta-derivative. Since none of the commonly used integral transform could be used to derive the solution of the proposed model, I proposed a new integral transform called Atangana-Transform, and used it, together with some iterative technique, to derive the solution of the model.

“My numerical simulations show that the disease is as deadly amongst pregnant women as Ebola,” Abdon said.

Abdon’s research was submitted to one of Springer’s top-tier journals with an impact factor 1.78. The paper was accepted and published February 2015.