Betty Dlamini

Betty Dlamini is a dedicated grassroots sports developer whose involvement in various sporting codes has received widespread acknowledgement from South African sports authorities

Tell us about yourself.

I work at the department of education as a senior education specialist. I am responsible for the different sporting codes, such as gymnastics, swimming, soft ball, tennis, hockey around the Thabo Mofutsanyana District Municipality.

What does your job practically entail?
I am involved in sports as a whole but I also do a lot of administrative work, such as planning for tournaments, training camps and taking the athlete’s to high performance centres and so on.
I do training and programming at the same time, including introducing new sporting codes in schools. If there is anything that I really do master, it is developing new codes from scratch at the schools.

What were your previous jobs before the current one?
I began teaching in 1981 where I was a teacher and a principal at the same time at a farm school in Ficksburg. From there I went to go teach in Matwabeng High School, in Senekal, where I taught for six years; before coming to QwaQwa to teach at the Bolata Intermediate School, where I taught for 15 years.

Tell us more about your current involvement in the development of swimming as a sport.
I started with swimming in 2003 and did water safety education around the Thabo Mofutsanyana area, where we trained educators about first aid levels one and two. From there we started the portal pool programme.
We tried to train educators in this regard, but they didn’t know where to start because there are no pools. Here in Thabo Mofutsanyana, especially in the Maluti-a-Phofung Local Municipality; most of the pools have been vandalised and can’t be utilised.

That is why I started with the portal pool training. In 2006, Swimming South Africa donated a portal pool to one school and we started training the children around the Bolata area. From there the department of education bought us three more pools and then we expanded the programme to other schools.
We struggled a lot because we could not transport the children to the bigger pools in other towns and that was when I decided to sit down and devise a formal portal pool programme.

Can you briefly tell us about the basic training procedures included in your programme?
We teach the children to learn how to swim in the classroom using regular basins, where we focus on three things. Firstly, it is the blowing of bubbles, secondly we teach them how to open their eyes underwater and lastly we put objects in the water for the children to retrieve. These skills are very import.

Normally when you take the children to the big 50 metre pools, they become scared and some do have water phobias. So that is why we start in the classroom.
I also try to carry out my programme in an exciting way, so that the children do not fear water.

From there we take them to the bigger pool where we teach them one basic swimming stroke; the freestyle stroke. We later check whether the children are now developed to swim across the pool and see whether they do use the inhalation techniques of blowing bubbles.

Where do you derive your passion for sport? Were you ever active in sport?
I used to participate in athletics while growing up; I loved field events. I did shot put, javelin and I used to run the 1 500 m race at school level. We had no club’s in those days; there were only clubs for white people where I come from, in Senekal. I only learned about clubs when I arrived in QwaQwa in 1987 and learned more about other sporting codes.

We have been locked out for quite a long time and I remember when I was a child, there were no adults to monitor us. Our people do have the potential but we do not have people who can develop us and give us skills and that is why I am burning inside, because I want our children to participate in sport and spend less time watching TV, playing video games or even using drugs.

When they are involved in sport, they can also focus more on their school work, because children who are involved in sport do excel more in the classroom.

What milestones have been reached in the context of what you do?
I remember introducing and developing gymnastics in several schools in 2005, which is a sport that had been non-existent in our communities.
In 2008, I had already developed a number of athletes that were participating in provincial, national and international competitions. During that year I had eight athletes representing South Africa in Cape Town where we hosted 40 countries at an international rope-skipping competition and six of them receive gold, silver and bronze medals.

In 2010, I produced two athletes who represented South Africa in London and in 2011 I had one athlete who represented South Africa in France. I had four representing South Africa in the United States at an international rope-skipping competition in 2012; at the University of South Florida in the city of Tampa.

Have you received any acknowledgements for your magnificent work?
Yes I have. In 2008, I received an award from Swimming South Africa as the Volunteer of the Year in the portal pool programme. I received a rope-skipping award in 2009 from the South African Gymnastics Federation for producing phenomenal athletes in the sport; who have gone to represent the country internationally.
In 2010, I was acknowledged by the department of education for teaching learners from dysfunctional schools some of the sporting codes, particularly rope-skipping.

Apart from going to Florida in the US, which other countries travelled to through sport?
I travelled to Botswana in 2010 where I was a team manager for Swimming South Africa. Next year we are going to Hong Kong. Currently, we are training our athletes for the competition in Macau, China, and we will know by December who the athletes that have qualified for the event are.