A vacant title for 2020
The Sprite Ball Championship has a boys' season with no champion. On 15 January 2020 the organizers, Rite Sports Limited, confirmed that Keta Business College (KETABUSCO) had been stripped of the title it won a fortnight earlier, and that the trophy would not be passed down to another school.
The decision followed the school's indefinite ban, announced a day earlier. An investigation led by the Ghana Education Service (GES) had concluded that five of the players used in the competition were not students of the school.
The final that no longer counts
On 4 January, at the El Wak Stadium in Accra, the Keta side had beaten Mfantsipim School 48-40 in the boys' final. The result stands in the scorebook. It no longer stands in the honors list.
Among the five players implicated was Prince Gidisu, who had been named Most Valuable Player of the tournament. The MVP award and the coach's prize given to Senyo Ashiagbor were both recalled by the organizers.
Why Mfantsipim were not promoted
The obvious candidate to inherit the trophy was Mfantsipim. The Cape Coast school had finished second, came in as defending champions after winning the 2019 edition, and had lost both its games against the disqualified team, the final included.
Reports gathered from the organizers said that would not happen. Their reasoning went back through the draw. The Keta team had knocked other schools out on its way to the final, and those schools had been denied the chance to progress and contend for the title themselves. Sekondi College, Opoku Ware School and Prempeh College all fell to the ineligible side during the two days in Accra. Handing the trophy to the beaten finalist would have rewarded one school for a path that several others had been denied.
It is a hard decision to argue with, and a hard one for Mfantsipim to accept. A school that had already won the competition five times went home from a season in which it was beaten only by a team that should not have been playing, and still has nothing to show for it.
The rest of the 2020 tournament
The vacancy applied only to the boys. The girls' division, played on the same courts on the same weekend, kept its result: Shama Senior High School edged St. Louis Senior High School 15-14 in the final, a first title for the Shama girls. Gifty Nkrumah was named MVP of the girls' event, and Shama's George Hanson took a coach of the tournament award.
West Africa Senior High School finished third in the boys' division, and Kumasi Girls' Senior High School third among the girls. Neither placing was affected by the decision.
| Division | Final | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Boys | Keta Business College 48-40 Mfantsipim | Title stripped, no winner declared |
| Girls | Shama SHS 15-14 St. Louis SHS | Shama champions |
How the case unfolded
The chain of events took eleven days from the final to the vacant title. Complaints about the winning squad started immediately after the trophy was lifted. On 10 January the organizers said the headmaster and PE staff had been called to GES headquarters. On 14 January the ban was confirmed after the school's PE master admitted that five players were unqualified. On 15 January came the ruling on the title itself.
GES had also said it would announce separate sanctions for the headmaster and the teachers involved. The school's own exclusion from the competition carried no end date, so the Keta side could not even try to win the trophy back on the court the following season.
What the empty year means for the record
In the roll of champions, 2020 now sits as a blank line in the boys' column, directly after Mfantsipim's 2019 win. Anyone reading that list later will find the gap before they find the reason for it.
The championship carried on. A later edition drew its finalists from the regional qualifiers, and the regions listed for the 2021 Sprite Ball final show the same route into Accra that the Keta school had taken. In November 2023 a radio report carried the announcement that the competition would return in 2024.
Schools entering after 2020 were to play under the updated rules the organizers had promised in January, written to discourage cheating. The full roll of winners, and the schools that have come closest, is kept on the Sprite Ball page.