Final four action on tonight at MSC
THE semifinals of the Upper Demerara Football Association’s (UDFA) ‘Man-Up: Be a Champion for Change’ Under-23 football championship will be staged this evening  at the Mackenzie Sports Club ground, with Net Rockers taking on Vasco, and old rivals Bakewell Topp XX meeting Milerock. The first place team will cart off $100 000 with the runners-up getting $50 000 and third-placers $25 000. The winners of tonight’s action in which the first match kicks off at 1830hrs and the second at 20:00hrs, will clash in the final, scheduled for Sunday at the same venue.
This tournament was organised by the UDFA, in collaboration with the Ministry of Human Services, in conjunction with the Region 10 Domestic Violence Committee which partnered with USAID and UNIFEM, to make this $500 000 promotion a success.
Vice-president of the UDFA, Mr Sharma Solomon, said yesterday, “It is just the weather we were looking at, which delayed the semifinals, but we should see the completion of this tournament, this weekend.”
Coordinator of the Domestic Violence Policy Unit within the Ministry of Human Services, Abassy Mancy, at the opening outlined that this championship would not centre only on playing football, but also on the clubs, in various sessions, tackling the topics chosen on domestic violence.
The aim is that by engaging men and boys, who invariably are the perpetrators of domestic violence, it would serve and impact in curbing certain attitudes on the hot topic.
Mancy had stated then that this is a pilot programme for Guyana and there are six trained facilitators who were engaged to conduct the hour-and-a-half sessions for club players, where the players learnt about Gender Roles, Gender Base Violence, Fatherhood, Anger and Conflict Management and Resolution Techniques over a five-week period; and were evaluated on the system of Gender-Equitable Men Scale (GEM Scale) which measures perceptions to assess change in attitude.
Before the tournament began also UDFA vice-president Sharma Solomon, who is also a vice-president of the Region 10 (Upper Demerara/ Berbice) Domestic Violence Committee, said that each club would have had to attend sessions once per week for the duration of the tournament, where they would have earned crucial points for attendance to the sessions.
The teams which participated in this tournament were Amelia’s Ward United, Milerock, Bakewell Topp XX, Silver Shattas, Eagles United, Blueberry Hill United, Regal United, Winners Connection  and Net Rockers.