People are making some good points about school rugby

 

Let’s face it, when you agree with what’s being written, it’s damn fine writing.

With that in mind, there’s been some pretty good stuff being put up recently about the state the state of school rugby.

There was Gregg van Molendorff’s piece about Greg Wilmot likening the professionalisation of school sport to a runaway freight train; then Alan Miles (who doesn’t write nearly as often as he should) spoke about the effects of the pressure being put on schoolboy rugby players; and today I read an excellent piece on what’s wrong with allowing massive winning scores to mount up – on the NextGenXV website.

They are all issues that I’ve been on about for years now. The problem is that they have been getting worse, not better.

Take the matter of teams being allowed to post huge winning margins. The NextGenXV story was about Grey College beating Outeniqua 92-3 last weekend. That was a 1^st team game with players who are prepared like professional athletes. So much of what I’m going to say might not apply to them. My real concern is about uneven contests in the lower age grades, and the damage that they cause.

I had a whine about this one last year after Potch Gimnasium lost 83-3 to Paarl Gimnasium. In that post I mentioned that I had written on the topic in 2017, 2018, 2022 and them, in 2023. It’s 20024 now and here we go again.

Here’s an extract from that 2018 piece. It’s a bit over the top, but I must have been angry:

You’ll remember that last year a team that won 221-0 posed for a picture in front of those numbers on the scoreboard and the photo was posted on the school’s Twitter and Facebook sites, to great acclaim. I commented at the time that it was as sickening as those pictures that you see of so-called hunters posing over the carcasses of slain lions or elephants that had been chained to stakes. I have the same nausea again today, and it’s an appropriate comparison, because rugby players who are willing to turn out for the lower teams in the junior age groups are rapidly becoming an endangered species and we should be doing all we can to conserve them, just like we should be looking after those magnificent wild animals.

 

I shared the NextGenXV piece and I got the expected opposition from some quarters. Those who object to lop-sided matches being called of early, generally have two reasons: they believe it’s wrong to deprive the winning team, who have worked hard, and maybe spent a lot of money to be there, of a full game; or they point out that there are lessons to be learnt in taking a good hiding and that there is no “50-point maximum” rule in life.

 

I’m not going to repeat the points made about the physical, emotional and psychological damage that a 100-point loss can have on a teenager. And, yes, I know that you can’t blame a superior team if their opponents give up. The problem starts with allowing the mismatch in the first place.

 

Instead, I’ll quote myself again:

 

My view is that anything that happens at a school has to be educationally accountable, and there’s nothing educational about allowing scores in rugby matches to reach those numbers. Education is about learning things that help children grow and develop into good adults, and that’s as much about building character, kindness and humility as it is about building strength, acquiring skills and accumulating knowledge.

 

Allowing a team of children to be humiliated, discouraged and possibly injured, during a rugby game, while at the same time allowing the other team to bully them, to gloat, and to assume an air of superiority, is not educationally accountable, and that applies to both teams.

 

As for the point about going to so much trouble and expense for possibly just one half of a rugby game, the educational value goes way beyond the one-hour match situation. There are teaching and learning opportunities at training, on the bus trip, on the side of the field, and if the game is called off early, well there are all sorts of lessons there too.

It’s true that you can’t call off the game if things aren’t going your way in real life. And it is our job as educators (and school rugby coaches are educators first), to prepare young people for that. But is subjecting children to pain and trauma the best way of doing that? Isn’t that a bit like the story of the father who tells his kid to jump – “don’t worry, I’ll catch you” – then lets him fall on his face. Telling him, “that will teach you never to trust anyone!”

There have to be more humane, caring ways to teach the lessons of courage, resilience, handling misfortune etc, than sending the hapless E team out to take 100 points from the Superstar School across town, and then have the winners post a gloating picture on Facebook.

 

School rugby can really become a runaway train, if you let it

 

There’ve been murmurs, as there often are when the pressure and fatigue of an unrelenting school rugby season begin to bite, about how the superb system we appear to have going – the one that’s the envy of the other rugby playing countries – is maybe not as shiny and clean as it should perhaps be. Especially seeing that sport at school is actually not an extra-curricular programme, as it’s often referred to, but in fact it is – and there’s no debate here – firmly at the centre of what should be taught and learnt in schools.

Gregg van Molendorff, deputy headmaster at Graeme College, has written a piece in which he recalls that, five years ago, he warned that the culture in schools regarding winning and losing was leading to undesirable behaviours, on and off the sports fields. Sadly, we are in more trouble five years later than we were back then, he concludes.

He quotes a paper written by Grahamstown sports psychologist, Greg Wilmot - https://wilmotpsychology.co.za/navigating-the-professionalisation-of-school-sport-in-south-africa - , who calls the professionalisation of sport at schools a “runaway freight train” – out of control and gaining speed and momentum all the time as it proceeds.

Between the two of them, Van Molendorff and Wilmot produce a list of all the things going wrong in school sport, ascribing them in the main to a culture which measures the value of a school by the results of its elite sports teams, and the lengths to which schools are prepared to go to keep those teams winning.

The actions of coaches, parents and players in response to the resultant pressures are at the heart of what’s going wrong.

Wilmot points out that there has not been much research into the effects this has on schoolboy players and that many of the stories we hear are just that – unsubstantiated anecdotes. He even quotes me as one of the storytellers. although the column he refers to:

https://www.iol.co.za/sport/opinion/professionalism-in-school-sport-not-always-bad-1990101

is actually more about the greater player safety that a professional approach has brought than about what's going wrong (I did, however, tell a number of horror stories in that regard over the years).

They may not be research-backed, but the abuses that inevitably arise when winning matches is the dominant value ascribed to, are well known. And we have all known about them for some time.

I’ll spare myself the trouble of summarising the lists of the two educationists above and give you mine. It’s the same as theirs, and I know it by heart. The points are chapter headings in my book (and I will publish it one day).

I actually preface that bit by speaking about what I call “The Lance Armstrong Excuse”. I got the idea from the famous Armstrong interview with Oprah Winfrey. In it, he told her that he didn’t believe he was cheating by doping during his seven Tour de France victories because everyone else was doping too. He was justified in breaking the rules, he said, because he wasn’t getting an advantage.

Those sitting in judgement of him didn’t fall for that, neither did most other fair-minded people, I’d hope – including the very educators who now feel they can indulge in the practices below because every one else is. “You’ll never be competitive if you don’t,” is the refrain.

So, they pressure rugby players into specialising at an early age; they subject them to exercise intensity and workloads that have been shown to be inappropriate for their ages; they go out shopping for players to fill gaps in their planning; they turn a blind eye to rapid changes in body size and shape that could not happen without chemical assistance, etc.

And when things go wrong, they blame the players themselves, or their parents, or the body builders in the local gym. They speak of “unforeseen consequences” when they know exactly what could happen.

Runaway freight trains, we see in the movies, are impossible to stop once they get going. You have to remove some of the load back at the start of the journey, then you need good brakes, and a driver who keeps the whole thing under control.

The harm done to young men if you don’t do that, Wilmot points out, is real and lasting. You don’t need research to see that.

Two things that make our schools rugby great

 

I was invited during the week to a briefing to mark the launch of the 2024 SDC Noordvaal Cup tournament. I went along because I saw that Swys de Bruin would be part of a panel discussion and was interested to hear what he had to say and because I knew I’d see some old friends there.

Swys said all the right things about reducing the pressure on schoolboy rugby players and getting them to play for the enjoyment of the game, although I fear he was preaching to the wrong congregation – in my experience this competition, and its forbears, epitomises the importance of winning like nothing else I’ve seen.

The tournament was called, several times, the biggest in South Africa and, possibly the biggest in the world. In my days as a reporter, I learnt never to say things like that. Whenever I did, I would be called out pretty smartly to be told of something else that was older, or bigger, or whatever.

I don’t know what they mean by “biggest”. If its about the highest number of schools, and teams, playing in a single, unified competition over a number of weeks culminating in day in which the finals of all four divisions are played under the same banner, it might well be that there is nothing quite like it anywhere else.

If you are measuring big by the number of matches and players involved, however, I’ve argued in the past that there’s nothing to match a Saturday morning in the non-league, “friendly”, schools rugby season. Take this weekend, and the independent schools are on holiday, remember. There will be 21 rugby matches at Jeppe, where Westville Boys’ High are the visitors; Pretoria Boys’ High are travelling to Maritzburg College with 25 rugby teams; and there will be 27 games at Parktown, where KES are the visitors, over Friday and Saturday.

That Parktown fixture is interesting. KES have way more teams that they do, so Springs’ Boys High are also involved and the sides are matched up so that every KES team gets a game on the day. Last Saturday Rand Park filled in simiarly at Jeppe vs St Stithians, and later in the season Northcliff will help out in Jeppe’s games against St John’s.

That’s 74 games at three venues this weekend. On a full match day in the Noordvaal competition, there will be 17 fixtures and assuming that each school fields eight teams (which definitely won’t happen in the lower divisions) that adds up to 136 games. When the private schools get back, and if you add in the fixtures at the smaller Joburg schools, and at those in Durban, Cape Town and the Eastern Cape, you will see that the numbers don’t compare.

That’s not to say that the Noordvaal Cup is not a great tournament. It provides regular competition to 37 schools and their games are played in conditions that meet professional standards. And there's no doubt that the highly competitive nature of the competition, and the pressure that involves, makes for the development of very good players. Those are the sorts of things that people are talking about when they say our schools rugby system in the best in the world.

And side by side with that, we have this huge mass participation, non-league setup that, by the way, is largely demographically transformed.

I’m excited about this weekend’s Jeppe vs Westville exchange – it will involve over 1000 boys in all sorts of codes and activities – and I can’t wait, too, for April 20 when the Noordvaal Cup kicks off with Helpmekaar vs Monument, a pretty tasty matchup to get things rolling.

40 years later, and the Easter festivals are as good as they have ever been

 

The schools rugby festivals have been part of Easter in this town since 1984. The Saints Festival would have been celebrating its 40th anniversary this year if it weren’t for Covid, St John’s have had their 25^th  birthday and this year is the 20^th KES festival.

Those who came up with the idea in the beginning could never have imagined they would have the longevity they have had and that, all these years later, when the world would be such a different place, we could have a day like Saturday.

I was at King Edwards in the afternoon, and at St John’s earlier and I don’t recall seeing crowds bigger than those. I meant to go to Saints too, but I was worried that I’d never find parking back at KES for the Jeppe game, which I (and half of Joburg, it turned out) wanted to see. I’m told there was a massive crowd there too.

The founders of that original Saints Festival who first had the vison have, sadly, all passed on now. Colin Hall, who was later to become a giant in the South African business world, was the head of the parents association back then, he died earlier this year; Mark Henning the headmaster in 1984, died in 2021; and Tim Clifford, the rugby coach who came up with the concept, passed on a year later.

I’ve been around these festivals for most of the 40 years and seen something of their inner workings. They have become big commercial undertakings, and fund-raising enterprises for the schools that run them. But the educational principles articulated in the beginning are strictly adhered to.

I’ve spent the last few festivals at KES, where they give me a place to sit in the tournament office and I leave at the end of each one newly amazed at the level of commitment and the sheer hard work put in by so many, mainly volunteers to make it all work. I’ve been a spectator to the same activities at the other two festivals, so I know the same things are going on there too – they could never run the way they do if they weren’t.

And on Saturday those dedicated workers were rewarded with the smooth running of big, big days in three different places. 40 years later the Easter festivals, amazingly are bigger than ever, and as good as they have ever been.

 

It's Easter rugby festival time, and I'm looking forward to things staying the same again

 

Sport, these days, is entertainment and the laws of rugby, in particular, are continuously being tweaked to make the game more appealing to spectators, and to TV audiences.

And schoolboy rugby, I’d argue, is the most entertaining form of the game – the numbers that turn up at school fields around the country every Saturday bear that out. And now you can see most school games on TV too, thanks to SupersportSchools.

There’s usually no room to spare at the big interschool derby games, and there won’t be again this weekend at the Easter Rugby Festivals. There are three in Joburg – at St Stithians, St John’s and King Eward VII School – at a couple of others in other places.

The Standard Bank KES Festival is the youngest of the three Highveld events, and it’s the 20^th staging of it this year (it would have been the 22nd is it were not for Covid). The first Saints Festival was in 1984, and St John’s started theirs in 1996.

They are a long-term success story and while there have been some changes to them down the years, they have remained the same in principle, based in their hearts on educational values.

I dug out one of the earliest programmes from the St Stithians Festival and those values were articulated in it:

“The idea is to invite like-minded schools that share a values-driven ethos and have a healthy attitude to sport. It is a festival of rugby with no overall winner, no tournament team and no man of the match awards. The idea was to match schools who don’t normally meet during the season, and as far as possible, there will be no derby games and no repeat fixtures from year to year.”

That’s still how it is. I’ve been fortunate to spend the weekend at the KES Festival for the last few years, and I’ll be there again this year. I was in the office there this week to pick up accreditation tags and I heard those sorts of things spoken out aloud by the organisers. The values are never deeply buried, despite the intense busyness that’s there in the leadup to the event. It’s exactly the same at St John’s and St Stithians, I’d wager.

What goes on between the lines on the field, Adi Norris, the director of the St John’s Festival once told me, has to remain exactly the same for the players, year after year, and the hype and commerciality that surrounds the event must never be allowed to interfere with that.

That’s exactly right. I know that’s what’s going to happen at KES this year – for the 20^th time – and I’m looking forward to it.

KES have assembled an impressive lineup of schools to mark their anniversary. They will only play two games each this year. That’s a change, but a necessary one in the interests of the safety of the players, given the incredible concentration of fixtures at this time of the year and the number of games they are expected to play in a short period.

The 12 schools that played in the first KES festival in 2002 were: King Edward VII, Jeppe High School for Boys, Parktown Boys’ High School, Queens College, Paarl Gimnasium, Durban High School, Affies, Pretoria Boys High, Rondebosch Boys’ High, SACS, Selborne College, Wynberg Boys’ High.

Of those, KES, Jeppe, Parktown, Queens and Pretoria Boys High are back.

Fixtures

Saturday

8am Hudson Park vs Queens
9.15am Northwood vs Brandwag
10.30am Bishops vs Dale
11.45am Ben Vorster vs Eldoraigne
1pm Pretoria Boys High vs Selborne
2.15pm Queens vs Jeppe
3.30pm KES vs Paarl Boys’ High

 

Monday
8am Ben Vorster vs Queens
9.15am Paarl Boys’ High vs Pretoria Boys High
10.30am Northwood vs Hudson Park
11.45am Eldoraigne vs Selborne
1pm Dale vs Parktown
2.15pm Jeppe vs Brandwag
3.3pm KES vs Bishops

I'm not a fan of the language-use in Chasing the Sun

 

I took some flak in the comments section when I said, last time, that the use of the F-word in the Chasing the Sun documentary was way over the top.

I watched the first episode of the second series last night and if anything, the language is even worse.

I’m an educator at heart, one who believes rugby can play an important role in the school curriculum because of the lessons that can be taught through it.

There are skills and techniques that can be learnt and the players become fit, strong young men, but the lessons learnt are really about values. Just like young people acquire facts and figures, and techniques in their years at school, but what we really want them to learn is to become good people. “Good sons, good fathers, good husbands” is a refrain that comes up at boys-only schools quite often.

And I’ve always thought the right kind values can be taught through rugby. People have different ideas about what those are, but courage, commitment, discipline and reliability are certainly some of them. So are some “softer” issues, the ones that define decent behaviour – sportsmanship, honesty, teamwork, courtesy, gratitude etc. Rugby is a game that develops character, good people get the success they deserve. Terms that have become cliched, perhaps, but those are things we tell ourselves, and the players.

The story of the Springboks and their successive World Cup victories is a fantastic one, and the way Chasing the Sun celebrates how certain players have overcome their dire circumstances is deeply moving. The team has mastered what it takes to be winners at that level.

They are the embodiment of many of the values the game teaches, and Rassie Erasmus is an expert at harnessing all of that in the cause of victory. It’s inspirational and if I were a coach I’d want my players to watch the series, and I’d be looking for quotes and anecdotes to use in my coaching, and teaching.

Excessive repetition of the same profanities is, however in my view, a sign of lazy language use. That’s a lesson that teachers who want to produce good people should be teaching, and using the most foul expressions imaginable, all the time, is surely not helping in instilling the values of decency that we claim the game teaches.

Swear on Rassie and the boys – I’m told it happens in every team and dressing room at that level – I’m close to my dotage now, I know, but I find it offensive and, worse, not the example I’d want school players to follow.

Here comes the flak …..

Under 14 is not too soon to go on tour

I remember a time when schools wouldn’t let their youngest teams – U13 then, U14 now – go away on sports tours. The feeling was that touring was a privilege reserved for the 1^st team, something the others should aspire to.

The little ones, it was believed, should concentrate on learning how to play the game (s) first, and that was best done without exposing them to the pressure of playing games at out of town schools. I agreed with that thinking then – part of me still does – do 12 and 13 year-olds really have to be playing on a national stage before they have got the basics down?

But, those were different days, I concede. Sport at the schools that take it seriously is way better organised now, the level of coaching is on a whole new level and the stakes, at 1^st team level, are higher than they have ever been. Anyone will tell you that the degree of success you achieve at senior level is directly related to the quality of your junior programme.

So, U14s began playing across the country too, on a limited scale at first, increasing year by year until we have what took place at Jeppe this weekend past: U14 basketball and water polo festivals so big that they needed three and four days to complete them, involving just about all of the like-minded schools around the country. It was the 25^th year of the U14 Ken Short Water Polo Festival – with the Covid interruptions; while the U14 Basketball Festival has been going for eight.

I was at Jeppe for all of those four days and I came away realising that we weren’t completely right all those years ago and that festivals like these can be a very effective tool in teaching players just starting out what the games they have chosen are all about, on and off the field.

Probably the most important thing, though, is that the two Jeppe events are festivals, not tournaments. They used to be tournaments, with knockout round and finals, and tournament teams used to be chosen, until the headmasters of the schools who play in them agreed that all of that be stopped and that they be played as festivals in which, while the results of matches should matter to the teams involved, they have no greater significance than that.

I’ve taken some flak in this space for condemning an early-season under-14 polo tournament held at a local school where there was a winner, and for speaking out against the SA Schools tournament where they now go down to U12 level – 11, 12 and 13 year-olds playing fully competitive interprovincial sport! Those are things that have no place in educational sport.

And that’s what it is and has to be – educational. There’s where the benefits of playing in a more non-competitive atmosphere kick in. Basketball and water polo are similar games in a number of ways, one of which is that they have biggish game-day squads, but relatively small numbers of players on the field at any one time. At this level, you are unlikely to have a full squad of players who are on the same level, skills-wise, so the temptation, when the result is vital, will be to keep your best players in the game while the rest of the squad warms the bench. That’s flat out not allowed at the Jeppe festivals, and the coaches buy in to it. How are the weaker players going to improve if they don’t get game time? That’s the educational value of a festival.

Then there are the number of matches played in a short space of time. The players get to try out what the coaches tell them, almost straight away. Not that there aren’t gaps between games. That’s when the boys get to hang out together. I spotted them sitting in the shade of the trees and in the marquees at Jeppe throughout the weekend, talking trash and roughnecking – being boys, in an age when doing that is somehow frowned on. Multiday events like these create those opportunities and it’s there that team spirit is built; friendships are cemented and socialisation lessons are learnt – the things that turn those U14 teams into good 1^st teams in four years’ time.

And I haven’t even mentioned the interaction between the coaches and the massive efforts put in by a horde of officials and volunteers to make the two events run smoothly and finish dead on time despite losing all of Saturday afternoon due to the inevitable Highveld thunderstorm.

So, while I do sometimes miss the innocence of a more amateur time in school sport, I saw enough at Jeppe last weekend to convince me that, the way they went about it, they have got it right and that U14 is not too soon to tour.