An anniversary gift on the school compound
Pope John Senior High School and Minor Seminary, a two-time bronze medal winner at the Sprite Ball Championship, opened a brand new basketball court on the weekend before 19 February 2018. The unveiling was part of the school's 60th anniversary celebrations in Koforidua, the capital of Ghana's Eastern Region.
Catholic Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckle performed the formal opening. He cut the sod at the venue and declared the court open for use, a role that fitted a school run by the Catholic Church since its founding.
The celebrations were framed around the school's contribution to education and sport in Ghana over six decades, and the court gave that theme something visible to point at.
Who paid for the court
The construction money came from one man. Adu Sarkodee, Chief Executive Officer of CDH Financial Holdings and an old boy of the school, provided the funds needed to build the facility. Reports at the time described the sum as enormous but did not publish a figure, and no other donor or company was named alongside him in the accounts of the ceremony.
Several members of the school's leadership attended the ceremony:
- Headmistress Benedicta Foli
- Assistant Head Kwame Adjepong
- Physical Education masters Patrick Owusu and Fred Dwamenah
The two physical education masters were the staff most directly affected. They would be the ones running training sessions on the new surface in the months that followed.
Sixty years of Pope John
The anniversary dates back to January 1958. The school opened on 21 January that year as St. John's Seminary and College, with 45 students, on buildings that had gone up from 1955. It was later renamed Pope John Secondary School and Junior Seminary in honour of Pope John XXIII, and after the 2007 education reform it took its present name, Pope John Senior High School and Minor Seminary. The name itself is younger than the school: Angelo Roncalli was elected pope as John XXIII in October 1958, nine months after the first 45 students arrived.
Today it is an all-boys boarding school at Effiduase in Koforidua. When the Catholic Diocese of Koforidua was created in 1992, management of the school passed to the new diocese. Students and old boys commonly shorten the name to POJOSS.
Close, but never in the final
On the basketball court, Pope John had become one of the steadiest schools in the Sprite Ball without ever reaching the last game. The team had played in the semifinals at each of the three most recent editions, and the record still showed no appearance in a final.
The most recent of those runs had ended only weeks before the anniversary. At the 2018 championship at the El-Wak Stadium in Accra, Pope John lost in the semifinals and then beat Sacred Heart Technical Institute 21-12 in the third-place game, according to Graphic Sports. The boys' title went to Presbyterian Senior High School, Osu, who beat Mfantsipim in the final.
Pope John had earned its place at that tournament by winning the Eastern Region qualifiers in November 2017, when the team edged Koforidua Senior High Technical School 31-30 in the regional final. That regional title came after an unbeaten run and a one-point semifinal against St. Peter's Senior High School.
Why the timing mattered
The court arrived at a useful moment. Pope John was preparing for the next round of regional qualifiers, due later in 2018, with a place at the following year's Sprite Ball at stake.
Both Pope John and Koforidua Senior High Technical School, known as KSTS or "SecTech", are Koforidua schools, and the regional final between them in 2017 was settled by a single point. KSTS had hosted the first Eastern Regional Sprite Ball tournament in October 2008, so the rivalry for the region's place at the national finals was already a decade old.
With a private court on its own grounds, Pope John could now schedule practice without competing for space, host visiting teams and give younger players time on a proper surface. Whether that would be enough to carry a team past the semifinal stage, where it had stopped three times running, was the question the next championship would answer.