The Sunday Mail
Brighton Zhawi
NEW Zimbabwe Table Tennis Union president Noah Ferenando is a former computers teacher who plans to work like a machine to take the sport to new heights.
“I want to be more of an operations president than an administrative one,” Ferenando told The Sunday Mail. The-37-year-old administrator was unanimously chosen as the man to govern Zimbabwe’s table tennis for the next five years following an annual meeting in Harare last week.
“It came as a shock, I thought I was going to retain my technical directorship post but all the provinces and commissioners had trust in me,” Ferenando said. “To my surprise no one contested for the presidency it was a unanimous victory 15 out of 15 voted.”
Having joined ZTTU in 2007 where he was the deputy national technical director to Newman Gomendo, Ferenando succeeds John Muringani, who quit last August.
“I have been involved quite a lot in the development of the sport from the grassroots level, that’s my passion.
“The vision I have is first of all we need to have a strategic plan as Zimbabwe Table Tennis because the current one is obsolete…we need a strategic plan that speaks to the new trends in the sporting fraternity. “We also need a constitutional amendment so that we align our constitution to the Region V, to African Table Tennis Federation and ITTF.”
Ferenando also has a vision of having a viable ZTTU board.
“I would also want to have an expanded board, currently we are working with four office bearers that is the president, vice-president, secretary-general and the treasurer.
“We need to have the technical director and deputy technical director being part of the executive committee then we also expand to have the media and marketing departments.”
Ferenando also believes that the game must be spread to the rural areas. “I am going to be pushing the technical team…we have agreed to have 10 (coaching) courses (national level one) one in each province for free, we wish to push for numbers. “We also want to move from the notion of having table tennis being an urban and elite sport I am actually driving an agenda of introducing table tennis in rural areas and it’s coming up well”. But what got him into table tennis?
“I was into volleyball more at Zimre Primary school where I taught computers.
“We came to Old Windsor for a volleyball workshop in 2007 and I saw people playing table tennis. The owner of the school Mr Tsai was playing with his son Ken, I got interested and asked them if they could teach me how to play.
“I would come at Windsor for training, when he was back in Taiwan I would train with his son.
“I then went back to my school and quit volleyball for table tennis …we didn’t have table tennis tables …we used to practice on desks.’’
Ferenando also confirmed that Zimbabwe will send a team to the African Games in Morocco in August.
