Ascension Day - a big schools rugby weekend that's gone now

 

Thursday was Ascension Day – a day of religious significance that was a public holiday in the past but was removed from the calendar at some stage when the number of holidays was reduced.

From a school sport point of view it was an important holiday because it always fell on a Thursday, which made for a long weekend during the second term and a good time to play out of town schools.

KES and Jeppe used to play against Northlands and Durban High School on that weekend alternating between Durban and Joburg. I was the fixtures secretary on the Transvaal Schools committee those days and I remember that there was a standing instruction that KES and Jeppe had to play each other before Ascension Day because they used to share a bus down to Durban and the trip would have been tricky had they not yet met.

At some stage a similar two-school arrangement was started up between Joburg and Durban co-ed schools on that weekend. There were eventually 10 schools from each province involved and it became a festival, sponsored by FNB, and played at a central venue. I was at the newspaper by then and used to report on it. It was quite a big deal. Girls hockey and netball were also played.

The Jeppe and KES double-headers fell away when Northwood (after the merger between Northlands and Beachwood) became too weak.

I’m not sure when the co-ed festival was dropped and I wonder what became of those schools. I think you’d battle to find 20 co-ed schools who play rugby at a decent level between the two cities nowadays.

I’ve been trying to remember who those co-ed schools were, and while some of the Joburg schools – Northcliff, Fourways, Rand Park for example – still play good rugby, others like Sandown, Sandringham and Hyde Park have pretty much fallen by the wayside. I imagine it’s pretty much the same in KZN. I wonder if schools like New Forest, Queensborough, Grosvener and Port Shepstone still play the game at all.

It is, of course, the other side of the professional approach to school sport coin. The top schools in the two cities draw all the talent, often stripping those sorts of schools of the odd good player who might emerge at them. They have little regard for the wasteland that they are creating and justify their actions in the name of rugby excellence and the development of future professional players.

In the meantime, the educational experiences that those boys got out of those weekends have disappeared and the foundations underpinning the game have become narrower.

Happy Ascension Day.

 

Some weekend highlights - big wins, narrow wins, and games where wins don't matter.

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend?

It’s hard sometimes, with so much going on, to get that warm and fuzzy feeling about just one thing, so please forgive me for listing a few.

Firstly there were two very meaningful one-point rugby victories.

KES beat Noordheuwel 23-22. While there has been some schadenfreude around our top rugby school having a rare bad year, I’m delighted that they got one back, and against a top school too. There is grit and resilience aplenty in that team, and they have a great captain. Things just haven’t been going their way, but they did on Saturday, good for them.

Later on, just down Joe Slovo Drive, the Lions beat the Ospreys 29-28. It hasn’t been a good year for them but they’ve stuck to their style of attacking rugby, often to their detriment. At least they got some reward for it on Saturday. I’m a tragic Transvaal/Lions fan – have been all my life – so any win’s a highlight for me.

I was at St John’s on Saturday where Jeppe’s 1^st rugby team beat a St John’s side seemingly more concerned with keeping the score down than scoring themselves. Not many highlights there, but up on the top field early in the morning I watched for a while a rugby game between two teams of the tiniest of tots. There were no posts and no scoreboard, the coaches were on the field, teaching, and the kids were smiling. It was great antidote for the dreariness that was to follow.

The big highlight of the weekend, though, has to be Jeppe’s victories in the Aitken and Boden Trophies. They also won the U16 Top 10 tournament earlier, and their U14s have yet to lose a game. I spend a bit of time around the hockey section there and, for me, the secret of their success is the classic formula:  talented players, good coaching, top-class facilities and a challenging fixture list. Added to that there is support from sponsors; a parent body (they call it the Hockey Patrons Association) that is right behind the boys; and a great family feel.

And orchestrating it all is Bryan Hillock, their indefatigable director of hockey, who instils a steely discipline and is always reminding everyone that “this means more”.

All of that is why they are so good. Their recruitment is good too, sure, but that’s not the only reason why no-one can touch them at the moment – as I heard from some disgruntled spectators at the finals on Sunday.

Putting your list of top 18 year-olds on TV is just not right

 I’m showing my age a little here.

When I first started going to the Craven Week in the 1990s Dr Danie Craven used to be there. He was getting on in years, and running South African Rugby, so he never spent the whole week, but he’d be around for a day or two, and he would speak at the SA Rugby-hosted dinner on one of the nights.

He had a cruel tongue in those speeches, I recall, and he’d use it when he disapproved of what he saw. There was a certain prescience in the things he mainly complained about – he could see his vision of what the week should be – a values-based festival of rugby with no winners and losers, and no individual honours – being replaced with the full-on tournament that it has since become.

I remember Doc at the 1991 week in East London. At that time there was a pundit working for SABC TV by the name of Zandberg Jansen. He was a wonderfully eccentric old man with a colourful use of Afrikaans idiomatic language. He would analyse the Currie Cup games of the previous weekend, and draw up what he called a “barometer” – a ranking of the players. Those were the isolation days, remember, so rugby fans were drawn to that sort of thing. It was good watching and I tried not to miss it.

Anyway, that year they sent him to the Craven Week and he set about creating a barometer of the players there. I was covering the week as a freelancer for The Star, but I was still a teacher then, and on the Transvaal Schools committee, so I was in on things and it soon became clear that the officials at the week, all teachers in those days, many of whom had been there for a while and were steeped in the spirit and traditions of the week, didn’t approve.

They felt it was wrong to be singling out players and were concerned that making Jansen’s list would be seen as a prize to aim for, putting unhealthy pressure on the 18 year-old players and distracting them from the real reasons why they were there. And what about the players who don’t make the list?

Some games were televised in those days, but SABC didn’t own the week the way DSTV does now, so the talk around the midmorning coffee and milk tart table was that Jansen should be told to bugger off. They were contemplating how to do that when Doc Craven arrived. He’d seen the show the night before and you can guess how that all ended.

No barometers at the Craven Week for the next 33 years. But is that about to change?

I love SuperSport Schools. They have taken school sport to a whole new level, giving players a platform to show their stuff, and bringing the games from around the country to those like me who love watching them.

They’ve gone into punditry too now with weekly magazine shows, and guess what? Zandberg’s barometer is back. I enjoy the programmes and I admire the pundits, but this week they published a pecking order of players in hockey, and I don’t approve. In the rugby show individual players have also been named, praised and discussed at length.

They have indicated that this will be regular feature with names added to and subtracted from the lists, I assume. And I know they are going to be at the inter-provincials in the winter.

A lot has changed since the days when Doc Craven used to pop in at his week, I know. What hasn’t changed is the fact that these are 17- and 18-year-olds, and that education is about building character. I just don’t think that rating and ranking them on national television is doing much for that. Do they really need that sort of pressure, on top of everything else that goes with playing in a must-win team environment, in their matric year, just when they are starting to become adult men and women?

Doc Craven knew they don’t all those years ago. So do I, but then, I guess I’m showing my age a little.