It's really not about the 1st team

Following last Saturday’s excellent win for Monument over Garsfontein the Twittersphere was abuzz for a while on Sunday with people wondering if any team in the Northern part of the country would be good enough to beat them.

Not surprisingly, the talk eventually got around to wondering if Jeppe, who were impressive in beating Westville Boys’ High on the same day, wouldn’t be a worthy challenger and asking when that fixture is.

That’s when I weighed in, explaining the Jeppe don’t play Monument, they haven’t for quite a few years now and, I’ve heard that one of the reasons for them dropping the fixture is that Monument simply don’t have enough teams to make it worthwhile dedicating one of their scarce fixture dates to a meeting between the two schools.

When Jeppe played KES two weeks ago there were 23 rugby games on the day. When they last played Monument I would be surprised if there were more than 12 or 14.

Sure, it would be nice to see Jeppe play Monument at 1^st team level, especially this year, but the 1^st team game is just one encounter in the fixture – the others are also important.

That’s a fundamental difference in the way in which the traditional English medium schools (and some Afrikaans schools too) see the role of sport at school, and rugby in particular.

Well, at least it’s how the English schools used to approach sport. These days, I’m not always so sure anymore.

The extra-curricular programme is part of the educational activity of the school. It’s there to teach lessons and its final product – the girls and boys who are part of it – should exit the system with skills, values and attitudes that will give them every chance of success in the world beyond school.

It’s not supposed to do many of the sorts of things that the media and the greater school community – parents, old boys and supporters etc – are demanding from it.

In the case of rugby, it’s certainly not there to produce future professional players, although when a shining star is identified in any field, the school does have a responsibility to nurture and support that talent so that it, again, has every chance of success in the future.

Sport is competitive and that’s good to the extent that some lessons are better taught and learnt in the hot atmosphere of competition. When winning becomes the dominant value, however, things quickly go wrong.

Your values are what you live by, remember, and some are prepared to die for them. They are non-negotiable and unchangeable. If winning is your value then you are declaring that you will try to win at all costs. And when you do that, ethical and educational values that are seen as hindering you are discarded.

Your school may rise to the top of the rankings, and your list of old boys who become Springboks may grow, which brings fame and prestige to your school, but is sport’s role in the educational process being preserved?

I’ve gone on and on about the sorts of practices that go on in schools rugby that I find unacceptable, there’s no need to repeat them here. The point is that victories for the first rugby team are what the schools are after and stories of helping boys from disadvantaged backgrounds through bursaries, or preparing talented players for careers in rugby are really just excuses.

And it was never just about the first team. So, for Jeppe, for example, to give up one of its precious 2^nd term weekends to host Westville Boys’ High on a day that involved 600 boys from each school in all sorts of activities like they did last weekend, was way more valuable that using it to play a handful of rugby games against Monument, even if the 1^st team game would have determined who’s who this season.

Taking rugby away from schools is insane

When I left the world of formal newspaper work one of the things I thought I wouldn’t miss was the pressure of writing a weekly column.

I’m as opinionated and in love with the sound of my own voice as anyone, so I enjoyed sprouting my views on issues I was passionate about each week, the problem was that there’s a deadline attached and it’s not easy being a wise-arse on demand. I don’t miss the writer’s block that all columnists sometimes face.

But I couldn’t help myself, so I started these scribblings and I carried on bothering those who read them with my outdated views and half thought through ideas. At least there’s no timeframe attached and no-one is forcing you to read this stuff. You had to make a series of clicks to get here, so it’s your own fault.

I do still sometimes wonder what to write. And sometimes a topic falls into my lap making it easy.

And never was it easier than today when the All Out Rugby (AOR) website tweeted an invitation to join what it calls The Big Debate and asks the question “What to do with schoolboy rugby…”

Now there’s a possibility that Tank Lanning has his tongue in his cheek and he is being intentionally provocative, to get the debate going. He has written enough that I agree with over the years to make me wonder if I haven’t taken the bait the way he wanted his Twitter followers to.

His answer to his question is: Bin it! The argument he makes, and it’s reinforced by Zelim Nel of the AOR team, is based on a notion that school rugby, in the form that it exists, is not helping the players that aspire to careers in professional rugby. Schools, they say, are there to “educate our kids” so they should hand rugby over to some sort of club structure and concentrate on other things.

The talent identification processes, basic skills teaching, competition structures and whole-person developmental roles that the schools have been fulfilling for 100 years would, presumably, be performed at clubs and it would be even better, Nel says, if 1^st and under-16A teams were grouped into pools so that national champion schools can be identified and future Boks can be examined.

To sweeten the pot, they throw in transformation, pointing out quite correctly that the quality of coaching players of colour get is determined by the schools they can attend. That’s where their argument goes a bit wonky. Almost all the black players who have advanced to the senior ranks have come through the elite side of our schooling system and, in any event, you can’t talk about elite youth development and grassroots in the same sentence. If you want the top payers to be better professionals they need elite treatment.

And of course you have to grow the game and spread the net at the same time. How is taking it away from the most ubiquitous of rugby providers – the schools – going to do that?

That’s the 1^st point where I don’t agree with AOR. School rugby is not there to supply players for the professional game. Sure, as is pointed out, you want dentists and tax advisors to be professionally trained, but since when did their training start at school?

Far cleverer people than me are pointing out the value of a holistic education and saying that a varied school experience increases your chances of success in your career later on. And when it comes to so sport, studies have shown that even the top professionals are best served by playing various sports earlier on.

You won’t find a reputable physiologist or child psychologist who would agree that early specialisation in sport is a good thing for young people.

The second way in which they go wrong is in suggesting that schools have a duty to prepare rugby players for a future as professional players. Sure, it can be a lucrative career for the handful that make it, but the chances are slim and the risks are high. Less than 5% of Craven Week players go on to the pro game and only 23 1^st team players from each province go to Craven Week.

And only the very best players have a professional career of 10 years or more. It’s considerably less for most of them. And then there are injuries. I was there when one of the best players from last year’s matric crop did his knee in a Varsity Cup match at the very start of the season. He is out for the year, please God he will play again, but he might not. It happened in a flash, and it can happen to any of those players who are being groomed for greater things in the game.

So it’s irresponsible for schools, or anyone else, to be promoting rugby as a career choice, without a backup plan. At the best schools they don’t do that. To move all junior rugby to clubs so that kids can take their sport “very, very seriously” to the exclusion of everything else is madness.

Unless AOR are really just extracting the urine and they don’t totally mean what they say. In which case, fair play, you got me.

You can read All Out Rugby’s piece at:

https://www.alloutrugby.com/what-to-do-with-schoolboy-rugby/

Look after those vulnerable young stars

I hit a luck, as they say, when I was asked to attend FIFA’s Cosafa Regional Workshop for technical directors this week, and write an article on it for the Fifa.com website.

The money wasn’t bad, but it was one of the two topics dealt with that really caught my eye –the running of Elite Youth programmes in the various national football federations.

The other topic was coaches education, at which they spoke about the things we studied in teaching diploma year – teaching and learning theory and practice.

It was what the world body is telling the technical directors of the various countries about how they should run their elite youth programmes that I found fascinating. I’ve often wondered why, in the disruption that has followed the professionalisation of the game of rugby, and its filtering down into schools, we don’t look at other sports where this sort of thing has been going on for years.

The professional soccer clubs in England, for example, still follow an apprenticeship system, in which vocational education and training is as important as football skills acquisition. Why are our professional rugby unions not following something similar with their annual signings?

And FIFA, I learned, has invested in loads of research on the best ways of identifying the best young talent, and have policies and procedures in place on how elite youth programmes should be run.

The national technical director who, nominally, is in charge of all the coaches in the national system should, among the others things he has to do, look out for the interests of the young talented players.

“The club youth coaches won’t do that” was a frequent refrain in the presentations. Their concern is to produce players who can graduate to the club’s 1st team. Players in the system who don’t cut it are discarded.

You have a responsibility to the game not individual clubs the technical directors were told, and players are people - not robots - they were reminded more than once.

I’ve heard some worrying stories about the way that those scores of talented young players who are signed by the rugby unions in this country are looked after when they leave school and go to the provincial unions. They are pretty much left on their own in some cases, it’s one of the reasons why so many of the gifted black players we see in action for their schools, or at the Craven Week never make it through to the senior professional ranks.

Without the special care that’s required to help them thrive in a strange new world they flounder, and drop out.

Without disclosing names, to prevent embarrassment, I can tell you an amazing story I heard the other day. One of the brightest young stars in Super Rugby, who had disappeared for a year after making his debut, has been taken into the home of his former school 1^st team coach, who went looking for him and found him hanging out in the wrong places, with the wrong crowd. Watch him go now!

That’s the sort of thing that needs to be done to realise the potential in brilliant, but vulnerable young players.

It’s something the football people have been aware of for years: the nature of that game is that the greatest talent is often found amongst the poorest of the poor.

The national directors at the FIFA workshop were told how to develop a policy to deal with this, to familarise themselves with the emotional, psychological and legal issues around vulnerable youth. It was the most valuable thing to come out of the three days, I thought.

It’s an area where our schools that are, in effect, morphing into elite youth academies should have an edge. Teachers are in the business of dealing with people, not robots. Those who keep it ethical and educational, and in the hands of people who care, deserve the success that comes their way.

Those that don't are doing no-one any good in the long run. That's FIFA's lesson to those who are running its game around the world.

World Schools Festival hasn't been much fun

The Paarl Boys’ High 150^th Anniversary World Schools festival has turned out to be the damp squib many of us expected it would be. Composite teams assembled a few days ahead of the time were never going to provide much a challenge for our top school teams who have, as their greatest asset, great coaching and meticulous preparation.

There were a few wins for the overseas school teams, but in all, it’s clear that the local schools are generally cleaning up.

It’s a new concept, formulated by Heyneke Meyer, and it seems to have gotten a lot of people quite excited. Not me though, I really battle to care much about the result of Outeniqua vs the Italian All Stars, or Paarl Gim vs the USA Rhinos.

For me, it’s been just another lurch down the slippery slope that leads down to the hole that school rugby in this country is digging for itself. 

Paarl Boys' High has been our top rugby school in recent years, I guess they want to call themselves the best in the world too, but this assembly of international opposition won’t prove that.

And it’s symptomatic of a deeper problem. It’s an extreme example of the adulitification of youth sport. I can’t believe that the educators in charge of the schools that agreed to the concept didn’t stop to wonder in which ways running a rugby “world cup” at school level would be a valid educational experience for the boys they are responsible for.

Surely the principle behind including sport in the educational curriculum is that lessons have a better chance of being learnt when those who are being taught are having fun. Having fun is playing with and against your friends. It’s fun to go on tour with your mates, staying together and playing traditional rivals. It’s certainly fun meeting people you played against many years later and talking about the games you played in the old days.

Some adults thought it would be fun to bring the top world school teams here and putting the top South African schools up against them. My colleagues in the social media seem to be enjoying it.

It hasn’t been much fun for me, and I wonder whether the boys who were prevented from strutting their stuff in front of the big crowds at the traditional Easter festivals like their predecessors have done, playing against opponents they will see again at the Craven Week, and next year, enjoyed it very much.