A world renowned speedcubing competition, administered under the World Cube Association (WCA) was recently brought to the Freestate, by CubingZA. Named after their main sponser and host, the Mimosa Mall Master Cubers 2023 speedcube competition, took place on Saturday, 25 November 2023 at Mimosa Mall in Bloemfontein. Just about a year earlier, on 19 November 2022, this competition took place for the first time in the Freestate, at the same venue.

The competition of 2023 made provision for both experienced and relatively inexperienced cubers. A Masters division for cubers who already attended two or more competitions and a Challengers division for cubers who only attended one or no previous competitions. These divisions created room for two of our Grade 12 (then grade 11) students, Hlahatsi Sekhamane from Lesotho and Anthony Majiedt from South Africa, to compete fairly against inexperienced cubers like themselves.

The first competition in Bloemfontein on 19 November 2022 had Anthony, his brother, William Majiedt (former learner at LHS) and cousin Harry Meyer (current Grade 12 learner at LHS) rubbing shoulders with the big boys holding South African National Records and African Continental Records, as competitors. Anthony however managed to reach the Podium in 4th place for 2×2 Cube.

This experience left Anthony excited enough to do a bit of skills transfer amongst some of his peers at school during the year. As soon as he received notification of the next Competition date, he pulled out his best approaching & convincing skills to try and get a few of his peers to join him in the next competition. With the date of the competition only a month away, at the time, and on the weekend just before the 2nd Maths paper in the year-end exams, he managed to convince only Hlahatsi. In an attempt to compensate for the pressure and inconvenience, he started to offer Tutoring lessons to students, who struggle with Maths and Physics, at a minimal cost in order to raise money to pay for his friend’s registration fees, in which he succeeded.

Hlahatsi (with his first introduction to the 3×3 cube only 4 weeks prior to the competition and 2×2 cube just 1 solve before the day of the competition) competed in the 3×3 cube as well as the 2×2 cube categories – what a brave young man! William, who totally neglected practise on his 3×3 cube, between completing his studies and having a part-time job, competed in the 3×3 cube category. Anthony competed in all 6 categories, including the Skewb (which was clear during the competition that he had no interest of mastering it.😅)

With basically no knowledge of how the new Challenger division works, the boys competed with the pro’s in every category with every round, hoping that at least one of them will get a stand on the podium in this new division. It just seemed way far fetched for any of them to be able to win anything with 6 of the Countries’ Masters in the likes of Ruben Grobler, Heinrich de Lange, Daniel Rush, Dylan Swarts, Joshua Christian Marais and Maverick Pearson busy breaking some of their own records and setting new National and Continental records.