IN the dusty playing fields of Jerera, far from the floodlights of Harare’s premier league grounds, a different kind of tournament is taking shape, one where the scoreboard matters less than who gets to stand on the pitch at all.
On October 24, eight schools from Zaka District will send their girls’ football teams to St Joseph High School for the inaugural LM Auctioneers Girls Soccer Festival, an Under-21 tournament built specifically for rural, school-going girls who rarely get a stage of their own.
For many of these players, teenagers from Mutsambwa, Magara, Rudhanda, Mutimwi, Chimbwembwe, Dzoro and Maningi Youth Soccer Academy, organised football has meant borrowed boots, unmarked pitches and matches that draw no crowds beyond the schoolyard. This festival, organisers say, is an attempt to change that script.
The tournament’s theme, “No to Drugs, Mental Health Has No Boundaries,” is not incidental. Alongside the football, girls will sit through sessions on mental health, substance abuse and reproductive health, an acknowledgment that what happens off the pitch shapes these girls just as much as what happens on it.
Behind the festival is Lewis Muzhara, a businessman whose company, LM Auctioneers, has quietly built a reputation for backing girls’ football in places most sponsors overlook. His involvement here is framed by organisers as a belief that talent is not distributed by geography, that a girl in Zaka has as much right to be scouted as one in Harare or Bulawayo.
That belief carries real stakes. Organisers say scouts from the Women’s senior, Under-20 and Under-17 national teams, along with Premier Soccer League coaches, have been invited to watch, with the promise that standout players could be recommended for national junior teams or even scholarships to study and play abroad.
The format is straightforward but the ambition is not. Two seeded sides, St Joseph and Mutsambwa, anchor a group stage that funnels into a knockout quarter-final, semi-final and final, no consolation matches, no easy exits. Every game will count.
Beyond the medals and trophies on offer, 25 gold for the champions, 25 silver for the runners-up, playing kits for every team, organisers say the deeper goal is harder to measure: giving girls from Zaka’s most marginalised communities a reason to believe football can take them somewhere.
Schools have until July 30 to confirm their place in what organisers hope becomes an annual fixture on Zaka’s sporting calendar, and, perhaps, a first step for some of these girls toward fields far beyond home.
