No rest for the wicked - or for the teachers at the serious sporting schools

 

They say there’s no rest for the wicked. That may be true, but in my experience, there are some very good men and women who happily give up their precious periods of rest, year after year, for the benefit of other people’s children.

I’m talking about the teachers at the best of our schools, of course, and although they may or may not receive some sort of travel and sustenance allowance for the days that they are away from home; and their efforts are borne in mind, I hope, when annual bonuses are allocated, they do it for no financial reward.

I spend some time at two of Joburg’s boys schools these days and their upcoming short October holiday period - which was, I guess, originally intended to give everyone a breather ahead of the push towards the final exams – is jammed with tours and tournaments in all of the summer sports codes that have only just began their 2025/6 seasons.

Two of the big 1^st team ones. The Michaelmas Cricket Festival at Maritzburg College, and the SACS Waterpolo Tournament, have been going for many years. Now they have been joined by competitions in the other age groups and, of course, by the Basketball tournaments and festivals that have been started up in response to the phenomenal growth of that game at schools.

While the opportunities created for so many children to do what they love and to learn the lessons that going on tours teach (along with the sacrifices made by those teachers and coaches) are a positive thing, there is also another side to it all.

It’s all calendar-driven. There’s room for just two rounds of interschool sports fixtures in the fourth term, before exams begin, and there is so much rugby and hockey on the cards the next year that the 1^st term dates available for the summer sports have been curtailed over the years.

So, it’s beginning to look like the summer codes are being organised according to tournaments and festivals, rather than featuring a game a week against traditional local rivals, like we used to have back when I was involved. Hockey and rugby are also going that way, it seems.

Since then, a number of the schools that were involved in weekly fixtures against the schools where I work have dropped out. They are no longer competitive and no longer field enough teams to make it worthwhile for the bigger schools.

That’s a tragedy, and there are many reasons why that has happened, one of the main ones being that they find themselves on the other side of the professionalisation of school sport coin. Their talent has been stripped through recruitment and, admittedly, they no longer put in the effort that they used to (for their own reasons).

So, at schools where mass participation is a value that is striven for – alongside elite high performance – you have to go the festival route to get enough games for your teams.

That’s why, over the next two weeks, the schools I mentioned, along with the others of their ilk across the land, will be in action in the Midlands, in Gqeberha, at Grey College, in Pretoria, and Paarl and Durban.

I’ll be keeping an eye on as much of it as I can, thanks to the magic of SuperSport Schools. And thanking the Lord for that horde of teachers who have forgone their well-deserved rest to make it all happen.

Lessons aplenty as cricket season gets going

 

The school cricket season’s here. Well, almost, there is still a football season to get through, but, for me, the Fasken Time Cricket Festival at St David’s Marist Inanda marks the changing of the season for the serious cricketing people and I was once again fortunate to have a seat inside the organisation, tasked with taking some pictures and putting together a little newsletter each day.

It’s quite an undertaking, made tougher by the fact that, as a far as mother nature is concerned, those massive lawns at St David’s, and at the other schools who hosted games, are just not ready for this particular type of ball game yet. You can tell they aren’t because they have the distinctive lines, semi-circles and rings that tell you football is taking place, clear for all to see.

That didn’t deter from some proper cricket being played though. The Fasken is special because it’s a festival of two-day games. There’s no rush to bowl the limited number of overs allocated, nor is there the imperative to smash runs off every ball. That kind of cricket comes later on in the season, and it’s hugely entertaining – I watch it whenever I can.

No, the relative leisurely pace of these games allows for the more classic skills and behaviours of the game to be applied, and it’s there that the lessons are learnt that make cricket such a good game to include in the bouquet of processes that schools utilise in the raising of young people who will be good adults one day.

Cricket is unique in some ways and it’s in those idiosyncrasies, often, that the life lessons lie.

For example, at the end of each day we, the recorders of facts and snappers of pictures, had to wait a while before the purple cap handovers could happen (more about them just now), while both sets of players disappeared into the distance to fetch the rain covers and lay them on the wickets. That’s a lesson cricketers are taught – when your game’s over you cover the pitch so that someone else can be sure of playing on it tomorrow

And those purple caps. At the Fasken the teams are asked to watch their opponents appreciatively and award a cap to who they believed was their best player on the day – you don’t see that in too many other games.

Walk from field to field, like I did, and you’ll see the players who aren’t on the field sitting together under a tree, or a gazebo. They stay put all day, trash-talking most of the time, but the coaches are amongst them, sightly off to one side, taking advantage of the teaching moments that always arise. Show me another sports event where fit, energetic teenagers show that sort of discipline.

I looked out for, and saw the customary special moments that you only see on a cricket field - a team disappear down the hillside to look for a lost ball; rounds of applause for special opponents’ performances – 50s and 100s scored, unplayable balls bowled; a wicketkeeper taking off his gloves to tie a batsman’s loose shoelace; and a fielder stretching out the leg of a cramping batsman.

Like I said – raising young people who will be good adults one day.

The Fasken’s done – roll on the cricket season.