Street football at Race Course Urban Legends 2016
View(s):The inaugural Inter university Street Football Championship organised by Sri Lanka Unites along with the Football Federation of Sri Lanka will take place at the Race Course Car Park next Sunday, January 17 from 1 p.m. onwards.
Seventeen University teams will be battling on a knock out basis. Each team will consist of seven players– 5 boys and 2 girls. Time duration for a match will be five minutes a half during all qualifying matches. Then it will be seven minutes a half during quarter-finals and semi-finals. The finals will be played for ten minutes a half. The size of the goal will be 2m wide x 1.30m height, with the depth approx 1m with a size 4 ball to be played to a new format.
A brain child of a set of youngsters of Sri Lanka Unites, a leading youth movement Urban Legends 2016, will be one-of-a-kind project which delivers recognition to rare talent unearthed from university students all round the country.
With a vision ‘Introduce street football as a mainstream sport in Sri Lanka’, Urban Legends 2016 will not only provide a platform to identify the hidden talents of the university students; it will also be aimed at providing necessary support to under-privileged children in the rural areas, to encourage them to learn and preserve the sport. In lieu of this the organisers will be collaborating with the effort towards the development of football and the plethora of skills it has to offer to the under privileged schools.
The organisers have already taken the initiative by covering over 60 schools island-wide reaching an audience of nearly 30,000 students by conducting workshops to use the game as an aid for social change. In introducing firsthand experience and technical aspect of the sport in rural schools, a well trained team of officials including all certified national and international coaches will proudly be part of this initiative.
Two parallel event finals also will take place on this day will be the FIFA Gaming Tournament and the Free Style Football Battle. The preliminary rounds of the Gaming tournament took place on December 5 at IIHE. Over 128 players battled out from 8 football clubs.
Free Style Battle will be held parallel to the Street Football tournament. This will be the first ever competition to hit the streets of Colombo. Athletes will go head-to-head in a contest of skill, creativity and ball tricks in three minute matches. The jury judges the athletes on style, technique and creativity. The competitors challenge each other, alternating ball possession every 30 seconds.
University teams that will battle for supremacy will be:
Achievers Lanka Business School (ALBS), Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology (APIIT), Australian College of Business and Technology (ACBT), Institute of Computer and Business Technology (ICBT), Institute of Information Technology (IIT), National School of Business Management (NSBM), South Asia Institute of Technology and Management (SAITM), Imperial Institute of Higher Education (IIHE), Royal Institute Colombo (RIC), Business Management School (BMS), Colombo Institute of Research and Psychology (CIRP), Sri Lanka Law College, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Auston Institute of Management, CINEC Maritime Campus, Edulink International Campus, Ruhuna University.