29 July 2016

Magoba Dream Team keeps Ugandan kids in line in the US


Maryland- It’s a fine summer day in Burtonsville, in the Montgomery county of Maryland.


Kids between ages 5-10 are enjoying a kick about under the guidance of coaches John Magoba and Robert Kato.


As the evening grows, the session intensifies with a variation of training patterns for the children. It is evident everyone is enjoying proceedings on a late Friday workout.


It is not a very detailed practice, just an organised football training gathering of a coordinated and upright bunch of families.


Welcome to the John Magoba Dream Team based in Maryland, USA.
Every Friday and Sunday, families bring together young boys and girls to play football at the Greencastle soccer field.
For the parents, friends and well-wishers, it is an opportunity to catch up amongst Ugandans around Maryland and Washington DC. For the kids, it is a moment to nurture their talent, learn knew friends and better their physical conditioning at Greencastle soccer field.


The John Magoba Dream Team name was coined by the parents.
“I had no hand in it,” Magoba tells Daily Monitor. “We were gathering here and somehow they (parents) came up with it and found it most appropriate.”


For him it is both a passion and calling.
He played football in the Ugandan topflight league in the 70s and 80s and has remained keen on soccer, despite living in a country where football by far usurps soccer in both prominence and popularity.


The football here being American football, of course.
Together with Kato, they take the kids through paces and instruct them on how to possess, pass and score better.
On the face of it, the kids are playing soccer and the parents are happy that their boys and girls are honing their skills at the game. But there is a deeper reason why Magoba is unrelenting in his love for the project, a motive that surpasses others by some distance.


“I first came in this country in 1966 as a 10-year old,” he expounds.


“And then I returned in 1971 and have since spent the better part of my adult years in the US.


“So I know that while America is the land of opportunity, it can also be a land of nightmares if our children are not raised under the true Ugandan values while here in the diaspora.


Responsible human beings
“It is why we encourage parents to bring their children here so that they make know friends, get to know more families from their Ugandan roots and grow up as responsible human beings and citizens of Uganda and the USA.”
Such is Magoba’s dedication to the cause that there is no payment required for a child or family to join the Dream Team.


“I do this on a purely voluntary basis because I love it and do feel it is my calling. I do not charge anyone.
What you have to do as a parent or guardian is to bring your child here in a Ugandan jersey of any type and automatically become part of us.”


Asked of another such venture in the States, he mentions of one in Atlanta but adds that “that one is for only boys.”
In a country where obesity is rampant, Magoba, 60, has maintained himself in fine shape and would comfortably pass for half his age.


He has never severed ties with his motherland and routinely makes trips back home to meet family and friends.
He is deeply concerned by the issues affecting Ugandan sport.
“It pains me that all fields have been given away,” he laments. “The fields that made Philip Omondi, in my book the best player Uganda ever produced, Tom Lwanga and many others are long gone.”
For a man who lives in a society where sports facilities are erected every other day for neighbourhoods to enjoy basketball, baseball, American football and soccer, Magoba wonders what the future holds for Ugandan sport. “We must inculcate the system of preserving sports fields. If we don’t, we are killing futures of tomorrow would-be superstars.”




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