A different Top 10 this year

It’s the first week of December and this is the time, in other years, when in my newspaper days I use to publish my list of top school sport achievements of the year. I carried on the practice once I’d left the papers – putting it out as a blog once the sporting year had ended.

Well, there was no sport for most of 2020, and now that the kids are slowly beginning to go out into the fresh air again, I think many of us have been forced to relook at our priorities and think about what the real role of sport at school should be. Is it really about winning matches in the short term? What do you lose along the way when you have that attitude? And won’t it be great to be playing competitive games again, win or lose?

So, no list of achievements this year but why not a list of the top things we should be doing to get back to values-driven, educationally based practices in school sport? What are the things we should do to make developing young people our goal, through the medium of sport? How can we call ourselves winners, even when our teams and individual athletes lose?

All of that is exactly what I’ve been on about for the last 30-odd years and, being a scribbler of words by profession and hobby, I’ve written enough to bore a battalion on the things I’ve seen and liked, and those that make me mad.

So, I’m going to bore you some more with 10 previous pieces. Publishing a collection of old columns and blogs is quite a common practice. I swore that when I finally write that book I’ve been threatening I wouldn’t do that. But this isn’t a book, and I’m embarking on the exercise, as always, mainly for the relief of my own boredom, especially this year when the SA Schools water polo tournament won’t be ending in Cape Town this week as it was scheduled to, and the Khaya Majola Week isn’t starting on Monday.  

Here’s the first of 10, written for the Saturday Star in 2015

1 The little things make the biggest difference

There was a time, quite a few years ago, when I used to cover provincial swimming. It mainly involved going to the national aquatic championships each year and something happened at one of those that came to mind while dealing with the reaction to my chirp last week about the ranking of the top schools in Africa.

In those days the nationals would conclude with a compulsory formal dinner attended by all the swimmers and at which prizes were handed out.

There was a donated trophy for the winner of every championship race. I’m not sure that they still have those cups, but I do know they no longer have that presentation dinner: a combination of rising costs and the poor behaviour of the swimmers, schoolkids, mostly, who tended to drink too much on a night when the tension of all that training and competition was lifted, put paid to that.

It was tradition for all the competitors to wear their “number ones” to the dinner – provincial blazer and tie for the boys, skirt and blazer for the girls, including green-and-gold blazers for those with national colours.

I sat there watching swimmer after swimmer go up to collect their trophies, without a single one bothering to collect their blazers from the chairs they had draped them over before meeting the dignitary making the presentation – not even those fabulous green-and-gold ones that they probably didn’t get much opportunity to wear.

Then, at a table next to ours, a young man heard his name being called out, donned his then-Northern Transvaal blazer, neatly buttoned it up, straightened his tie and went up to have his hand shaken. I had to ask when he came back: “What school are you at?” His reply: “Pretoria Boys’ High.”

It doesn't sound like a big deal, I guess, but looking back, the incident epitomises the sorts of things schools like that insist on. It was Pretoria Boys’ High that time, but it could have been any one of a number of the traditional schools I have interacted with over the years.

It’s an insistence on doing the basics right, and it plays a big part in the success those schools enjoy in everything they do.

I’ll give you another example. I was asked a couple of years ago by SA Rugby to take a former Australian international player to visit a local rugby school. He was a retired teacher over here to watch the Wallabies, and he wanted to get a feel for local education and schools rugby.

So I arranged for him to visit Jeppe High School for Boys. His wife, also a teacher all her life, came with us, and on the way back to their hotel much later she expressed her amazement that every schoolboy she came across throughout the day had a polite “good morning, ma’am” for her. You don’t get that at Australian schools, she told me.

It’s an educational version of the “broken window” policy at work – take care of the little things and the big ones will take care of themselves..

Pupils who take pride in their appearance and who have had the importance of good manners drilled into them will find it easier to do what’s required to succeed on the sports field, in the classroom, and in every aspect of  life.

It ought to be one of the categories that are evaluated when they draw up those “top school” rankings.

“Are the pupils neatly dressed and do they greet you?” Discover a school where you find that and, I’d wager, they do most of the other things properly too.

Next time: don't be arrogant, nothing lasts forever.