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18 September 2018
Soccer ladies relish challenge in Potch
Trinity Melakeco (right) in action for the Kovsie women’s soccer team against the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) last year. They will face TUT, the defending champions, on Friday 21 September in Varsity Women’s Football.
The Kovsie women’s soccer team has a tough challenge ahead of them in their quest to reach the semi-finals of Varsity Women’s Football for the first time.

The tournament starts on Thursday 20 September 2018 in Potchefstroom. The Kovsies’ best performance in the competition was in 2016, when they were fifth.

They are in the same group as the University of Johannesburg (UJ), the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), and Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). TUT has dominated Varsity Women's Football, winning four of the five tournaments. TUT and UJ contested the final last year, as well as the University Sport South Africa (USSA) tournament in July.

Kovsie coach, Godfrey Tenoff, says the challenge of playing the top-seeds is one they relish and welcome.

According to him, the ladies will have gained confidence from USSA where they ended sixth, improving by two places from 2017.

“We were satisfied with our performance at USSA. There are so much the players are capable of, but they don’t get the platform to test their talents as often as the men. We only play UJ and TUT once or twice a year, and there are very few teams in our province with that much talent. So, we have to get out more and find opportunities to play against top-teams to put our preparations and methods to the test.”

“We’ve had a good defence all season, led by our captain, Uma Jakalase. This will have to get us through the tournament.”

* The fixtures: 20 Sept vs UKZN; 21 Sept vs. TUT and UJ. The play-off matches are scheduled for Saturday.

News Archive

IRSJ marks five years of championing social justice
2016-08-12

Description: IRSJ 5 year Tags: IRSJ 5 year

Members of the Advisory Board of the IRSJ,
Prof Michalinos Zembylas (Open University
of Cyprus), Prof Shirley Anne Tate (Leeds
University, England), and Prof Relebohile
Moletsane (University of KwaZulu-Natal),
listen to a speaker on the programme.
 Photo: Lihlumelo Toyana

The Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice (IRSJ) marked its fifth anniversary with a function on 27 July 2016 in the Reitz Hall of the Centenary Complex on the Bloemfontein Campus of the University of the Free State (UFS). Earlier that day, the Advisory Board of the IRSJ, chaired by Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the UFS, hosted their annual meeting.

A new book was also launched, co-authored by JC van der Merwe, Deputy-Director at the IRSJ and Dionne van Reenen, researcher and PhD candidate at the IRSJ. It is entitled Transformation and Legitimation in Post-apartheid Universities: Reading Discourses from ‘Reitz’. The function featured not only reflections on the IRSJ, but a four-member panel discussion of the book and higher education in 2016.

The IRSJ came into being officially at the UFS in January 2011. Prof André Keet, Director of the IRSJ, said: “With a flexibility and trust not easily found in the higher education sector, the university management gave us the latitude and support to fashion an outfit that responds to social life within and outside the borders of the university, locally and globally.”

The IRSJ has not hesitated to be bold and
courageous in reforming ... traditional policies."

 

Prof Jansen went on to mention three things he finds appealing about the IRSJ: “Thanks to Prof Keet and his team’s vision and understanding of how important it is for students to have a space in which they can learn how to be, learn how to think, and learn how to contribute, the IRSJ has become a place where students can learn about things that they might not learn in the classroom. Second, it created, for the first time, a space where members of the LGBTIQ community could gather in one place. And third, it speaks to the intellectual life of the university, as evidenced by the research and publications produced over the past few years.”

Prof Jansen added: “The IRSJ will only be successful to the extent that we have safe spaces, courageous spaces, in which not only black students talk to themselves, but where black and white students talk together about their difficulties. If you’re entangled, you can’t get out of [that] unless you speak to the other person.”

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Prof Michalinos Zembylas of the Open University of Cyprus and member of the Advisory Board, said of the IRSJ: “The works produced by the institute in this short time have been valuable to this community and beyond, because they recognise the complexities of education, ... while pushing the boundaries of how to translate theoretical discussions into practical, everyday conditions. ... For example, the IRSJ has not hesitated to be bold and courageous in reforming some traditional policies in this university—remnants of an ambivalent past that reproduced inequality and disadvantage.

In reflecting on how the IRSJ came into being during her opening remarks, Dr Lis Lange, Vice-Rector: Academic at the UFS, said that it has always been “dedicated to transformation.” She added that it “gathered the energy and creativity of some of our most promising student leaders.” She concluded: “For me, the greatest success of the Institute, besides publications and local and international networks, is the fact that something that started in the margins is being asked today to come closer to the centre, to play a larger role in the structural transformation of the university.”

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