Two of my favourite school sports events took place within a week of each other. The 6th annual Kensington Community Cup soccer tournament was played last Wednesday, and this week, the U15 Iqhawe rugby week is on.
Nothing strange about that – it’s a calendar thing
– but, this time, they both happened on the same field: Collard, the main rugby
field at Jeppe High School for Boys. Jeppe organises the Kensington Community
Cup, a tournament involving teams from the immediate area around the school;
while the Iqhawe Week is an SA Rugby Youth Week, run by the SA Rugby Legends
organisation, and this is the second year in a row that Jeppe has hosted the
teams, although last year the games were played at the Johannesburg Stadium.
The idea with the Community Cup is to arrange a
series of games for the local schools – who hardly ever meet each other - and
to include a Jeppe team that never plays against those schools, even though
they are all within a 5km radius of each other. Sponsors are found to give the
players a good meal and each team goes home with a fancy bag filled with new
footballs, as well as a set of training bibs and some cones.
I wasn’t happy to hear that this year it was played as a
tournament, with a final, and that individual prizes were awarded – in the past
it was festival, with no points awarded and no individuals singled out. I
completely miscalculated what a big deal it all was for those teams and
players, and the spectators they brought with them. The winners of the final,
Jules High, were over the moon and the losers, Kensington Secondary, were
devastated. The boys named as the best players on the day were so excited and
their supporters overjoyed. It was something to see.
Sadly, that’s about as good as it gets for those
players – unless the best of them gets spotted somehow and gets into the youth
academy of one of the professional clubs. There really isn’t much organised
sport at those schools and SAFA has never done much in terms of broad-based
grassroots development (and then they wonder why other African countries, where
the professional game is way behind where ours is, but where there are national
development programmes, beat us in continental competitions).
The situation is a bit better with rugby, although the
challenges there are greater. There is pressure from all sides to make the game
demographically representative – code for less white – at the top levels, and
we all know that achieving that is a numbers game: to get more elite black
players you need more black players at the grassroots level.
Yet, those masses of potential players are at the same
dysfunctional schools that the soccer players are at, and it's way more complex to get rugby going from scratch. The rugby authorities are
fortunate in that the organisation of rugby at school level in SA is arguably
the best in the world. They have used that in their quest for transformation by
encouraging the established schools to bring in talented black players through
bursaries and, as a result, there are plenty of black players in the top 1st
teams around the country and many of them go to the SA Rugby Youth Weeks. It
means that the compulsory race quotas in those teams are met, but it is
increasingly going much further than that, and in most years, the best players
at the Craven Week are black.
It’s not entirely honest, those elite black players
aren’t coming from any sort of grassroots programme, and the number of township
and rural schools playing rugby isn’t increasing, but it’s a model that’s
working – the black stars shining for the Springboks at the World Cup this
month almost all went to the top rugby schools in the country.
Football isn’t emulating it in any way. It’s simply
not true to say that the private and former Model C schools don’t have football
programmes, it hasn’t been true for many years. There are high quality, mass
participation development systems at many of them, and fiercely competitive,
well organised competitions. Last weekend Grey College (SA’s undisputed top
rugby school, by the way), held its 18th Nedbank Soccer tournament.
The majority of players in action there were black, as they are at all of the
half a dozen or so similar tournaments held during the short, intense schools
football season that takes place at this time of the year.
SAFA is simply not interested, they still pretend
the game doesn’t exist at those schools and no attempt is being made to make their
programmes part of the player development pathway, the way that rugby does.
What I like about the Iqhawe Week is that it is
aimed at keeping rugby alive in places where it is in trouble. The SA Rugby Legends
Association -all ex-Springboks – runs a programme called Vuka that organises
leagues and playing opportunities for boys and girls who are not at established
rugby schools. They help out with equipment and coaching too. From there they
have a regional competition, and an interprovincial week – the Iqhawe Week. The
provinces send U15 teams to it, with the proviso that players from their established
schools must not be picked.
The Golden Lions union – where there are many
schools with rugby field and posts, at least - decided that their team will come
from schools who field four teams or less in inter-school matches. In addition to
that, they run a Vuka programme in the townships, with about 29 schools involved.
The problem there, according to Tim Goodwin of the Lions Union, is that they
don’t play enough quality matches in their season. That’s an area where the
established schools can help. I overheard the Jeppe people talking about
getting teams from there to fill in the gaps in their fixtures. I won’t be
surprised if that were to happen – that sort of thing is in Jeppe’s DNA.
I’m on record that I disapprove of player recruitment.
The Iqhawe Week is an exception. From the start, the idea was that some of these
players should be taken up by the established schools. I saw scouts from quite
a number of established schools at Jeppe this week – you could recognise them
by the chequebooks sticking out of their back pockets. While you can’t justify
taking a player who is already a star away from a school that has a functioning
rugby programme by saying it’s in his best interests; giving a player who shows
potential, but is unlikely to realise it where he is, a chance at an established
centre of excellence is a different matter. There were, I’m told, 22 players
who were granted bursaries by top schools at last year’s week.
And they are choosing a team this year that will play
in the U16 Khomo Week next year. The scouts will be watching them too, I’d wager.
Two highlights of the week for me – in the same place
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