A strong commitment to an extensive fitness programme has seen the University of Johannesburg team deliver a promising start to the Varsity Football season.<\/p>\n
After three rounds UJ are sporting an unbeaten record with two wins and a draw, placing them in second place on the log, two points behind early pace-setters North-West University.<\/p>\n
The team registered a significant 2-1 win over Johannesburg rivals Wits on Thursday and UJ soccer manager Joel Kgokong said much of their success was down to their conditioning.<\/p>\n
“We have got off to a good start and that’s what we were aiming for,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Much of this can be put down to the programme we have in place under one of sports scientists – Sereeta Miles – who has managed the fitness of the players very well.”<\/p>\n
He said an indication of this came in the University Sport South Africa tournament, from which they emerged with all their players’ fitness intact<\/p>\n
“Maintaining fitness is one of the challenges we have had,” added Kgokong.<\/p>\n
“You don’t normally compete in a tournament [such as USSA] where you play seven matches in five days and avoid injuries.<\/p>\n
“But that’s what we have managed to achieve and Sereeta has been able to get the players to peak fitness for the next tournament – Varsity Football.<\/p>\n
“So that is definitely one of the reasons why we have been able to perform better.”<\/p>\n
In addition to that, Kgokong said there was a strong sense of urgency in the camp that this was their chance to take the title.<\/p>\n
“We are tired of making the semifinals and sometimes losing in the final [UJ were runners-up in 2016], so there is a real focus on trying to win the tournament this year.<\/p>\n
“We have several players with a fair amount of experience because they have been part of Varsity Football since 2014.<\/p>\n
“They form the core of the team and understand the dynamics of Varsity Football and what we need to do to make sure we are in with a chance of winning.”<\/p>\n
Even though they were among the early frontrunners, Kgokong said they would not be looking further ahead than the next match.<\/p>\n
UJ are up against University of KwaZulu-Natal – who won the USSA title earlier this year – in Durban on Thursday.<\/p>\n
“For instance, we have always battled against teams like UKZN, who have twice knocked us out of the USSA quarterfinals.<\/p>\n
“Now they are battling a bit in Varsity Football [they’ve lost three out of three], but we know you have to take each match as it comes.<\/p>\n
“We are not in a rush and do not think we are going to beat everyone else. For each match we have a plan in place and make sure that we come out with at least a point, or preferably three.<\/p>\n
“If we can do that, once we reach match five we will be on track to secure a spot in the semifinals.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A strong commitment to an extensive fitness programme has seen the University of Johannesburg team deliver a promising start to the Varsity Football season. After three rounds UJ are sporting an unbeaten record with two wins and a draw, placing them in second place on the log, two points behind early pace-setters North-West University. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":58746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1913,1733,2093,1847],"class_list":["post-21303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-uj-football","tag-university-of-johannesburg","tag-university-sport-south-africa","tag-varsity-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southafricatoday.net\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}