There will always be a place for major corporate sponsors. I am not arguing otherwise. But sponsorship should be additional revenue. It should never become the business model. A corporation can change strategy overnight. A community takes years to build. The audience is the asset. The relationship is the asset. And if you built both, you should understand their value before handing them over cheaply in return for somebody else’ s logo on your event.
It had to be a culture event.
We also created our own little publicationcalled Slam Update. Slam Update played up school rivalries, personalities and star players. I remember names like Kingsley Makokha, Christian Awori of Strathmore, JP Owino and Steve Othoro of Alliance, and Tutu Yoga of ISK. These guys were fine ballers. We made stars out of schoolboys.
Again, we didn’ t know we were doing“ content strategy.” We just understood that nobody falls in love with a fixture list. People follow people. They follow heroes. They follow villains. They follow rivalries. They argue about who is better. They want stories. Sport without personalities is just a result. Sport with personalities becomes culture.
And then the event happened. Nyayo Basketball Gym was packed to the rafters. Packed. At some point we had so many people that we converted roughly half the basketball court into additional seating.
There was basketball. Dunking contests. Music. Hotdogs. Drinks. Rivalries. Noise. Fashion. Girls. Boys. Schools trying to outshout each other.
For a few days, four university students had somehow transported a little piece of American basketball culture to Nairobi- but given it a thoroughly Kenyan soul.
And that is when corporate Kenya noticed us.
When Coke Walked Into the Party
As I remember it, around the third day, people from Coca-Cola Africa came to the gym. Their regional office was then at The Chancery, and some of their people were in the crowd watching this madness unfold.
Put yourself in the shoes of a marketer. Here was an arena packed with exactly the kind of young, aspirational, culturally connected consumer every youth brand wanted to reach. And Coca-Cola had not created it. That is important.
The audience already existed. The culture already existed. The credibility already existed. They had simply discovered it.
About a week later, we were invited to present an idea showing how the concept could be rolled out more widely. And that is how Spriteball was born.
Suddenly, this small event that four university students had put together became part of a major corporate marketing machine. We started making stars out of high-school basketball players. Some of those boys got good money to become faces of the campaign. They are grown men now and can attest to it.
And the four of us? We got paid too. Good money.
Let us not rewrite history and pretend we were tortured entrepreneurs reluctantly accepting multinational cash. We were young. We had money in our pockets. We were travelling around Kenya and East Africa. We were running basketball events. Life was good.
The success of the format then contributed to another football concept, Coke Soccer Mania, based around five-a-side football and the same basic formula: participation, entertainment, youth culture and brand activation. More travel. More money. More events. More fun.
There was only one problem. Along the way, we killed our own 3-on-3 Junior Challenge. We had effectively exchanged ownership for the corporate cheque. At the time, that did not look like a mistake. Until Coca-Cola changed its marketing strategy.
Sport was no longer the main game. Music became increasingly important to the brand’ s youth marketing, with the era producing properties and campaigns around DJs and music. And just like that, our sports properties were no longer part of the plan. We were dropped like a jilted ex.
I do not blame Coca-Cola. That is an important distinction. Coca-Cola behaved exactly as a large corporation should behave. Strategies change. Marketing directors change. Budgets change. Consumers change. Head office changes direction. A sponsorship property that makes perfect strategic sense this year may make absolutely no sense three years later.
The mistake was ours. Because the kids on the ground did not understand any of that. They knew us. They associated us with Spriteball. They associated us with Coke Soccer Mania. To them, we were Coke.
So when we told them there was no more tournament, they did not care about marketing strategy. They just wanted to know: Why? And we had no good answer.
I still wonder sometimes where the 3-on-3 Junior Challenge might be today if we had never killed it for the Coke money. Thirty years later, perhaps it would have become one of Africa’ s biggest youth basketball properties. Perhaps not. We will never know.
But that experience gave me something considerably more valuable than a sponsorship cheque. It gave me a philosophy. Build something that can survive with or without a corporate sponsor. That thinking became part of the DNA that gave birth to Ligi Ndogo.
We wanted the relationship with the child. We wanted the relationship with the parent. We wanted the relationship with the community. And, above all, we wanted the ability to wake up tomorrow and continue operating even if somebody sitting in a corporate headquarters decided that football was no longer fashionable. More than 25 years later, I think we made the right call.
Fast-Forward to August 2026
Which brings me to why I am telling this ancient story now. On the weekend ending 23 rd August 2026, I organized the Ligi East Africa Cup.
There will always be a place for major corporate sponsors. I am not arguing otherwise. But sponsorship should be additional revenue. It should never become the business model. A corporation can change strategy overnight. A community takes years to build. The audience is the asset. The relationship is the asset. And if you built both, you should understand their value before handing them over cheaply in return for somebody else’ s logo on your event.
18 MAL74 / 26 ISSUE