Niger Delta Sports Festival Registration Hits Over 10,000 As Portal Closes March 7

Over 10,000 entries have been received in slightly over a week since the registration portal for the Niger Delta Sports Festival (NDSF) was opened on February 25. 

Enefiok Udo-Obong, the Co-Chairman of the Technical Committee released the figures early Monday and commended the State Liaison Committee members for driving the process in their states.

Perhaps, trying to reflect its position as the first state in alphanetical order in the country, Abia State is in the lead with 1957 entries as at 6am, Monday, March 3, 2025.

Ondo and Delta States follow in second and third place with 1168 and 1068 entries respectively.

In the registration by sporting events, Athletics has the biggest entry of 2199 and is followed by football and Volleyball with 1793 and 772 respectively. Other sporting events with impressive numbers are Handball with 664, Swimming-551, Basketball- 515 and Tennis with 505 entries.

Udo-Obong however expressed special pleasure with the numbers in some Sports such as Traditional Wrestling, Wrestling, Scrabble, Chess, Canoeing and Para-athletics which are all above 300.

“We are happy with how the registration is going so far with over 10,000 hits in eight days.

“Some states have done very well while some others need to do better. They all have four more days to ramp up registration”, Udo-Obong remarked.

With the registration portal closing on Friday, March 7, the organisers, Dunamis Icon warns that states that fail to register to compete in all 17 sports would be considered ineligible to participate in the local government and federal constituency trials.

The Technical Committee also announced the names of Technical Leads for the 17 sporting events who have been charged to supervise the state and local government trials.

The NDSF is a sports intervention project of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) with Dunamis Icon as the project consultants. The festival is for athletes indigenous to the nine NDDC mandate states who must not be above the age of 25 and have not engaged in professional football and boxing.