IAPS U13 Girls Football Tournament

The U13 Girls IAPS Football Tournament took place this past weekend and what a tournament it was. We had 9 schools taking part with Braeburn School fielding two teams, the U13 1st team girls in group B while the 2nd team girls played in group A.

The 1st team girls played their first match against Brookhouse winning the match 1-0 at fulltime. Our second match was against Kenton who we had played during the week and won convincingly but during the tournament they were a tough opponent, drawing the game 0-0. We proceeded to win our next two matches 1-0 against Pembroke and Turi respectively making us top our pool and playing Braeburn Garden Estate in the semi finals. This was our toughest game of the tournament. We had to be alert defensively, take every opportunity we got and disrupt our opponent's chances. The game ended 0-0 at full time forcing us to play 5 minutes of extra time, with whoever scored qualifying for the final. By the end of 5 minutes no team had scored and we had to have a penalty shootout. We had anticipated this might happen and had trained for penalties during the week, but we were not prepared for how nerve wrecking and emotionally tormenting it was going to be! All the five girls in our team scored the penalty shootout while Malaika, our goal keeper, saved one penalty to take us through to the final.

We played Hillcrest in the final. Despite our great effort, they were too good and we lost 2-0, coming 2nd overall in the tournament.

Three of the girls were chosen for the Nairobi West team, namely Malaika (goalkeeper), Aminata and Tiffany.