There’s a statement you sometimes hear that goes along the lines of
“don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”. It’s been rejected by the
business leadership gurus. I found that out when I Googled the term, hoping to
find out who it was that said it first (Teddy Roosevelt is given the credit,
though that’s not certain).
It’s been discredited, I read, because it discourages people from
pointing out what’s wrong, unless they themselves know how to fix it. And, in
any event, isn’t the boss being paid the big bucks because it’s his job to find
solutions?
Of course, some problems don’t appear to have solutions. None that are
easily apparent, anyhow.
I say all of this because I don’t accept that we should stop complaining
about the sorry state of school rugby in this country because we can’t come up
with ways to set things straight. Now I’m a whiner, not a solution provider –
Teddy Roosevelt's actual quote was “complaining about a problem without
proposing a solution is called whining” – but even I have a suggestion on how
recruitment, in particular, can be reined in.
The easy solution, of course, is to say: stop doing that! That would be
the ethical, educational, socially responsible thing to do, but things have
spun so far out of control that we all know that’s not a viable suggestion
anymore.
I received a surprisingly big response to my recent retelling of the
stories of the shocking experiences of two young players who were recruited on
rugby bursaries.
I got an e-mail from someone in New Zealand who sent me the links to
documents used by College Sport Auckland to regulate the movements of players
between schools in their area.
Take a look at them.
The gist of it is that when a player involved in what they call a
premier sport moves from one school to another, the principal of the school he
was at has the option to accept that it is a bona fide move, with nothing
untoward about it, or he can ask the principal of the school the player is going
to (the receiving school), the student and the student’s parents to fill in
declaration forms.
Those forms must confirm that no pressure was put on the player or his
family, no third party was involved in any way and that there was no incentive
to move in the form of a bursary payment etc
Now we all know that in the SA situation sometimes the receiving
principal will insist that none of the above happened. The boy just turned up
at the school, they’ll tell us, and said he wants to be there. Or his parents
moved from Cape Town last week and bought a house around the corner from the
school.
What’s significant is that the Auckland declarations must be signed by a
Justice of the Peace – they are sworn affidavits, in effect, and there’s a
warning that a false declaration will be referred to the police and could lead
to the expulsion of the school from competitions.
There’s a proposed solution right there. Get the principal to swear
under oath that there was no luring of a player, and to take personal
responsibility for any lies that are told. That would slow things down, I’d
wager.
I guess that these regulations were introduced in Auckland because they
were faced at some time with a similar situation to what we are facing now. The
difference, of course, is that there appears to be a regulating body
controlling school sport there. We don’t have that. School sport is under the
control of the principal of the school here and we have to trust him or her to
be honest.
And
of course we must assume that our principals are honest and honourable. But are
they all? If the stories we hear are true you have to wonder if, at best, the
principals of the schools involved are simply not in the loop or at, at worst, whether they are complicit in some pretty shady practices.
Giving
a multi-code organising body some sort of over-riding authority, or allowing
the provincial of national federations to intervene won’t work here, in my
opinion, because school sport is education, first and foremost.
So, don’t
ask me how it’s going to work. I’m a whiner, not a solutions provider, after
all.
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