Monday, July 16, 2012

Wilsen Initiative - Sport Tourism

Mathare North Rangers FC (MNR) is a product of Wilsen Initiative which nurture’s youth talents in football. It is a community club with the following goals;
  • We connect the youth with their community and beyond, whereby forging lasting friendships using football.
  • We envisage traversing our country by playing friendly matches and tournaments that will foster understanding of cultural diversity of people in Kenya and beyond.
  • We use sports tourism to help the youth explore more about their country and communities while learning about why they should embrace diversity in cultures, tribes and trends around. By doing so we shall be contributing to the National fabric of peaceful cohesion of people either directly or indirectly.
  • We also envisage to play in the top league of the Kenya Premier League (KPL) but at the moment it’s not the prime goal why the club was established, rather we would like to connect the youths with opportunities in football around and beyond, basically exposing their talents and urging them to use them to acquire new skills and opportunities.
Club history
The club was established in the year 2010 by Kamuzi Banda (Ex-AFC player), Kennedy Anyango (Nairobits alumni) and Samwel Kimindiri (Trainer at Nairobits). The club was called Rangers F.C though it didn’t have any links with the Rangers F.C (http://www.rangers.co.uk/) in the United Kingdom or Posta Rangers in Kenya whatsoever. It was just a group of friends coming together to play football for fun and participate in MYSA (www.mysakenya.org) zonal league, the team lacked a lot things from uniforms, footballs, leadership and talented player s, and this was expected because their major goal was to play for fun. Early in 2011 the three founders of Ranger F.C in Mathare North approached Wilson Masaka (Founder of Wilsen Initiative/ Web developer / ICT trainer at Nairobits) for a proposal to steer  the ‘ship’ with his many valuable experiences working with the youth, community  and  being well exposed football player having played in the Norway cup in 1997, 1998 and 1999 respectively.

At first Wilson couldn't just say yes, because as he had mentioned he didn’t want to do something that only him had the passion, so he was hesitant to repeat past experiences whereby he helped a group of youth establish a football club which was misguided by the passion of some of the youth of ‘get rich quick’ mentality or what’s there for me attitude expecting everything from one person while contributing nothing.

After many persuasion and assurance ( by Kennedy, Samwel and Kamuzi) Wilson could see a new dawn in generational change in youth who were seeking guidance, very passionate and ready to cooperate in seeing their team grow by actively participating in administrative issues of the club and that’s exactly what Wilson was looking for in a team. 
When Wilson Joined hands with the three founders the first thing was to re-brand the team and giving it some unique visibility around and beyond.  Some of the new ideas brought by Wilson and the team are;
  • Ranger F.C changed its name to Mathare North Rangers F.C (M.N.R) inspiring champions…
  • The team bought one uniform(18 jerseys ) which are all written the name of the team
  • One member of Wilsen Initiative donated one set of uniform (18 jerseys)
  • We have at least seven footballs of good quality.
  • We are expecting new uniforms from Wilson’s friend from Germany early August 2012.
  • A part from the material gains we have a great match of skills and talent within the team and everyone is working together in making small contributions when it’s required.
Having mentioned all this team still needs more support to help us reach our vision especially in our sports tourism program to engage the youth even further and link them with opportunities.
So if you have an idea or a football team and you would like us to do an exchange with your team or organization kindly write to info[at]wilsenx.com or Wilson.masaka[at]gmail.com

We thank everyone for the support offered so far to our club and general direction of Wilsen Initiative.
Official T-shirt designed by Wilsenx (Wilson Masaka)




Team Officials
Wilson Masaka – Head coach, Thomas Abungu – Asstitant coach, Team managers-  Kamuzu Banda, Samwel Kimindiri, Kenndey Onyango, Team Captain- Edwin Kipkoech


Written by Evaline Akida ( Asst. Secretary - Wilsen Initiative)

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