It's Easter, but there's no Saints Festival this year and that's a great pity

The Easter rugby festivals were supposed to kick off on Thursday but Covid-19, for the second year in a row, has put paid to that. 

I was asked to write a history of the event for a feature the Saturday Star ran a couple of years ago and I've included it in my book (soon to be published, I dream) in a chapter on enduring school sport success stories.

I'm feeling nostalgic today, contemplating festival-less Easter weekend, so I thought I'd tell the story again, here as my Two Cents Worth. 

The other long term school sport success stories I've included in the book are: St Benedict's unbeaten rowing run; the growth of girls water polo; Northcliff High at the co-ed schools athletics interhigh; St Mary's dominance of girls sport in Joburg; the rise of soccer in our schools; the Craven Week; Grey College as the top rugby school in the land; King Edward VII School's all-round excellence; and Monument's dominance of rugby in this town.       

The St Stithians Easter Rugby Festival

In 1984 St Stithians College turned 30 years old and, as is customary when it comes to school anniversaries, it was decided to mark the occasion with sporting events to which their long-term friends and rivals would be invited.

Rugby is generally the cornerstone of anniversary celebrations programmes, so it was decided to hold a rugby festival over the Easter Weekend that year. It was supposed to be a once off occasion, but it grew into an annual event, morphing into what is now the Saints Easter Sports Festival, a multi-code long weekend involving boys and girls teams, and a primary schools rugby festival the week before. If it weren’t for Covid-19, 2020 would have been the 36^th edition of the event.

The people who came up with the idea were the then Saints headmaster, Mark Henning, the master in charge of rugby, Tim Clifford, and the chairman of the Parents Association, Colin Hall. They had different motivations. Apartheid’s grip on the country was strong in the 1980s, but there were some chinks of light and one of them was that private schools like St Stithians were enrolling more and more black learners.

It wasn’t a move that was welcomed by the rugby authorities. Those boys weren’t eligible for provincial selection, and schools with black players weren’t allowed to enter league competitions. Henning wanted all the boys in the school to be given every opportunity to perform, so he decided to use the idea of the festival to let the black payers who were at the formerly whites only schools an opportunity to shine on a bigger stage.

Hall was a top business man – he was a director of SA Breweries and the CEO of Woolworths, among other achievements – and he saw the festival as an opportunity to raise the profile of the school and get it noticed on the national stage, which would result in greater enrolments. Tim Clifford was a rugby man, he wanted to see the best schools and players play on the St Stithians field, and to test his team against them.

The first festival featured 10 schools: Alexandra High, Bishops, Capricorn, Kearsney, King Edward, Potchefstroom Boys’ High, Pretoria Boys’ High, St Andrew’s, St John’s and St Stithians.

The idea was to invite like-minded schools that shared a values-driven ethos and had a healthy attitude to sport and it was decided from the beginning that it would be festival of rugby. There would be no overall winner, no tournament team would be selected and no man of the match awards would be made. The idea was to match schools who didn’t normally meet during the season, so there would, as far as possible, be no derby games and no repeat fixtures from year to year.

Much was to change over the next 35 years, but those basic principles were not compromised. The festival is still there and it has grown, despite the changing school sports environment. The credit for accomplishing that can largely be given to one man, Piet van Tonder. He took over from Tim Clifford as tournament organiser in 1987 and by the time that he retired as deputy headmaster of the school in 2013, he had run 26 festivals, always sticking to the values that the first ones had been based on.

In 1984 South African sport was buckling under the weight of isolation. There was no international rugby and the Currie Cup was the biggest thing on the calendar. That competition only began later in the year and at Easter not even club rugby was properly under way in Joburg. So, not surprisingly, the Saints Rugby Festival caught the imagination of the rugby-loving public. Spectators turned out in force in those early years – it was the only show in town – although, to be honest, there have been decent crowds at the festival every year since, even when other events began to compete for the attention of spectators.

One of the unwritten rules of the event was that schools would be invited for two years at a time and then sit out. This was done so that the net could be spread and as many schools as possible could be involved. In the 36 years so far over 70 teams have appeared at the Saints Festival.

Having so many of the top players at the festival over the years has naturally led to quite a number of first class and international players who once played there. There have been 28 Springboks who played at the Saints Festival and four of them - Bob Skinstad (Hilton 1993/4), John Smit (Pretoria Boys’ High 1994); Schalk Burger (Paarl Gim 2000) and Warren Whitely (Glenwood 2005) – went on to captain the country.

Of the current crop of Springboks, Bongi Mbonambi (St Alban’s 2009), Sikhumbuzo Notshe (Wynberg 2010), Jason Jenkins (St Alban’s 2013) and Curwin Bosch (Grey High 2015) appeared at the festival.

It was just a matter of time before a success story like this was emulated and, not surprisingly, it was St Stithians’ big Joburg private schools rivals, St John’s who were next to organise a festival of their own, in 1996. King Edward, who had been a permanent fixture at the Saints Festival since its inception, and its biggest crowd drawcard, decided to excuse themselves for a year, in 2002, to celebrate the school’s centenary with an Easter festival of their own. It was such a success that they too decided to make it an annual event, the third one in Joburg.

Since then Easter festivals, and festivals at other times of the year, have sprung up all over the country and all are successful, showing that there are enough schools that play rugby that people want to watch.

But through it all, the Saints Festival continues to grow and flourish, a great long term success story.