With a ban on public gatherings and school and tertiary sports due to the effects of the coronavirus, the University of Ghana sports directorate in an effort to engage the university community in the annual inter-hall games has rolled out the 2021 Virtual inter-hall games.

The event which is the first of its kind in Ghana will be bringing halls together to compete virtually.

Speaking on the initiative, director of the University of Ghana sports directorate, Dr Bella Bello Bitugu, indicated it stemmed out of the ban on contact sports in schools by the President Akufo-Addo.

“We can’t organize contact sports so what we are trying to do is to engage the community and do what we call, contact inter-halls through balloting and posting.”

The virtual inter-hall games are being hosted on Twitter and will see the 16 halls on the University of Ghana campus battle it out in five disciplines; football, basketball, volleyball, hockey and handball.

Teams will be paired up for each discipline and polls created on twitter where members of the halls, the university of Ghana community and any other interested persons can vote for the hall they support.

The tournament will run on a knock-out basis where teams who within the allocated time, fail to amass the highest number of votes in a particular discipline are immediately knocked out.

The games commenced on the 25th of January and saw, African Union hall(Pent), Akuafo, Legon hall, Elizabeth Sey, Commonwealth and Volta halls, Hilla Liman and Jean Nelson halls together with the Accra City campus progress to the quarter-finals of the hockey tournament.

Pent versus Akuafo, Legon Hall versus Elisabeth Sey, Commonwealth/Volta versus Liman and Jean Nelson versus Accra City Campus are the fixtures set to take place today in the hockey tournament.

Despite the efforts of the directorate to be innovative and adjust to the unfortunate demands of a pandemic, the news has not particularly been received very well by students with some of the view that voting for teams on social media does not have any component of sports.

The games are scheduled to run through till the 17th of February 2021.