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But I couldn’t help myself, so I started these scribblings and I carried on bothering those who read them with my outdated views and half thought through ideas.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/