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Monrovia – One of Liberia’s all-time outstanding soccer teams, Black Star Football Club is undergoing intense calibration in a bid to return the team to its prewar status, as stakeholders mostly founding members and executives of the once sensational South Beach founded club decide its future.
A founding member and onetime ace player of the club, former Liberian international Kelvin ‘Midfield Maestro’ Sebwe told PUNCH FM/TV online service in an exclusive interview that talks are ongoing to chart a course on how Black Star FC will face the future.
The club has been absent from the local soccer scene for years now, and Kelvin says modalities are being worked out to rejuvenate Black Star FC, adding that a homecoming program to be climaxed with an exciting soccer encounter between former and current players of the team and Paynesville All Star, is slated for Sunday, 11 August, at the Voker Mission Sports pitch, in Paynesville City, outside Monrovia.
“The motive is to bring the Black Star spirit back in a reunion gathering,” Kelvin said of the Sunday’s events.
“There is a need to rejuvenate the team, because it has done a lot in the football community of Liberia, including producing several players, who made it not just on the Lone Star, but on to the international scene where they plied their trade as professional soccer players,” Kelvin stressed.
Black Star was founded March 15, 1980, at Center Street, South Beach, in the vicinity where Liberia’s age-old Monrovia Central Prison is situated.
Harris Myers is the first president of the club, which was founded by friends and brothers; on one hand, the Sebwe brothers, Dionysius, Tom and Kelvin, and on the other hand, Varney Norris and his brother Boimah Norris, and then national team current sit-in coach Thomas Kojo and other friends in the South Beach Community.
The club originally founded as Young Black Star, sprung into action immediately upon its formation, beginning with playing community games, in a match in their backyard in the Center Street Community, then to Gurley Street, and after the Gurley Street match, Harris Myers, who later became the first president of Black Star advanced the idea of forming a team.
The team got its name through a process which allowed for several of the players of the club at the time to suggest various names, but the suggestion of former Lone Star right-back Thomas Kojo, which was Young Black Star, was the favorite – hence, Young Black Star now known only as Black Star, was birthed.
Young Black Star continued playing more community games those days, where there were so many community mock Olympic football matches being hosted in and around Monrovia, with the youngsters winning countless laurels each weekend.
Based on Young Black Star’s success in the community tourneys, a consensus was reached to take the club to another level; that level being to register the club in the LFA 3rd Division league hosted back then on the Newport Junior High School pitch, on Newport Street, central Monrovia.
Five Black Star players, Kelvin Sebwe, Thomas Kojo, Musa Silah, Abu Silah (deceased), and Mambo Saah, due to their excellent soccer artistry, were recruited onto Majestic, the feeder team of one of Liberia’s traditional soccer archrivals, Invincible Eleven (IE).
Those days, the rules of the Liberia Football Association (LFA) made it permissible for a player to play intermittently both in the second and third division leagues during a season.
But by the time Young Black Star reached the decision to register for the Division-3 league, the LFA rule allowing a player to freely rove between third and second division clubs in a league season was changed and players were now restricted to one club, something which had to make the club’s five players then featuring for the club and doing same for Majestic, to make a decision on whether to play in Division-2 or come back home to their first love and play in the 3rd Division.
Quite unexpected, Kelvin Sebwe, Thomas Kojo, Musa Silah, Abu Silah, and Mambo Saah, made the hard decision of choosing Young Black Star over Majestic, where a player would easily get called up to don the jersey of IE, then one of Liberia’s giants in football. Interestingly, two other original Majestic players, Joshua Kporyor and Amos Smith, who were intermittently playing for both clubs, followed the five, totaling seven players that left the IE feeder side to play for the South Beach club in the 3rd Division.
Young Black Star joined the 3rd Division league in 1985, and went on to emerge top winner in that year’s competition, thereby gaining promotion to the 2nd Division in the following soccer season of the LFA.
The following year, Young Black Star again, were in winning ways, as the star-studded club of skillful lads came atop the Division-2 league table, qualifying the team for its entrant into the topflight of the local football league.
Black Star’s entrant in the 1st Division in 1987, introduced to Liberian soccer a higher dimension of entertaining soccer display, as the team comprising exceptionally talented youngsters wasted no time in rubbing shoulders with the big guns from clubs they met in the top tier of the local league.
As a result of the club’s superb showings, 10 of its players were called up to Liberia’s U-16 team that year, and whereas, while playing in Division-2, Black Star had about nine of its members on the country’s U-20 squad.
The club produced half of a dozen of the members of arguably Liberia’s finest ever generation of players, as far as the senior national soccer team, the Lone Star is concerned – the team nicknamed “Weah-11”, had six of Black Star players, including two of the Sebwe brothers, big brother Dionysius and his junior brother Kelvin, Oliver Makor, Fallah Johnson, Thomas Kojo, and Alex Brown.
In 2008, Black Star won the treble in the Liberian league and represented the country on the international stage against teams from Guinea and Nigeria in the CAF Champions League and CAF Confederation Cup respectively.
