A police chief's gift to his old school
The girls of T.I. Ahmadiyya Senior High School had barely unpacked their medals when the country's most senior police officer called them in. Mohammed Ahmed Alhassan, Ghana's Inspector General of Police, donated GH¢1,000 to the Kumasi school, popularly known as Real Amass, for winning the female division of the 2014 Sprite Ball Championship.
The money was handed to the players and the technical team at his residence in Accra. Mr. Alhassan is an old student of the school, and the gesture was a personal one: a former pupil rewarding the current generation for a title won in the capital.
How Real Amass won the girls' title
The Kumasi side took the crown at the El-Wak Stadium in Accra, beating six teams on the way. In the final they defeated the defending champions, Aggrey Memorial, a school that had become a fixture in the closing stages of the girls' event.
The player most often named as the team's driving force was Rachel Obeng. Her influence ran through the whole tournament, and the scale of the win, six wins in the girls' draw, left little doubt about which side had been the best on show.
Mfantseman Girls finished third. In the boys' division the same weekend belonged to Keta Senior High School, who beat Presbyterian Boys' Secondary School in the final.
An Ashanti school on the honors list
The title put Real Amass into the record books as the second girls' team from the Ashanti Region to win the Sprite Ball. The first was Yaa Asantewaa, also from Kumasi, whose success had come at the expense of Aggrey Memorial as well.
T.I. Ahmadiyya is one of the older secondary schools in the city. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, Ghana founded it on 30 January 1950, and it is regarded as the first Islamic secondary school established in the country. Its first headmaster was Dr. S. B. Ahmed. Generations of students have carried the nicknames Real Amass and Amass Phobia, and the basketball team wore the first of them into Accra.
Who Mohammed Ahmed Alhassan is
Born on 21 January 1954, Mr. Alhassan did his early schooling at St. Martin's Secondary School and at T.I. Ahmadiyya. He graduated from the University of Ghana, Legon, in 1979 and in 1984 obtained a master's degree in police administration and criminology from University College, Cardiff, in the United Kingdom.
His working life began in a classroom. He taught at a secondary school from 1974 before joining the Ghana Police Training School as an instructor in 1979, and he later lectured part-time in police administration at the University of Ghana. Inside the service he rose through district commands at Tesano, Adabraka and Suame, divisional commands at Nkawkaw and Hohoe, and by 1994 the regional command at Tema.
A long stretch of his career was spent with the United Nations. He served with UN police missions in Namibia in 1989 and in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1997, joined UN headquarters in New York in 1999, and in March 2005 was appointed Police Commissioner of the UN Mission in Liberia, where he had been deputy commissioner since 2003. Community policing was his specialty, and he wrote on the subject.
A short tenure at the top
At the time of the donation he had held the country's top police post for about a year. He succeeded Paul Tawiah Quaye, acting from February 2013 before being confirmed in the role later that year, and he served as Inspector General of Police until November 2015, when John Kudalor took over in an acting capacity and Mr. Alhassan went on leave ahead of retirement.
Two years is not long in that office. The cash gift to Real Amass sat a long way from the security briefings and command postings of those years, which is part of what made it a story at all: the head of the police force stopping to reward a schoolgirls' basketball team.
Real Amass after 2014
The girls did not let the title go easily. Real Amass won the Sprite Ball again in 2015, once more beating Aggrey Memorial in the final, and finished third in January 2016 when Aggrey Memorial at last took the trophy for themselves. Back-to-back girls' titles put the Kumasi school among the strongest names in the history of the competition, which is set out year by year on the Sprite Ball page.
The following year's tournament produced a different kind of story on the boys' side, when a debutant from Takoradi, Bompeh SHS, upset the established order.