Agents keep out!

I was quick to pitch my two cents worth into a Twitter discussion this week on agents and schoolboy rugby players. My initial reaction, without really knowing what it was all about, I admit, was that I have never been so afraid in my life.

I’ve tried since then to find out a bit more about what’s going on, and although I still don’t think I’ve got the full picture, I’m still horrified to hear what’s going on, and that there are people debating how best to use talented 18 year-old rugby players as a source of income, for schools and rugby player agents.

I got to hear about it – as is often the case when it comes to what’s really going on behind the scenes – via the online content of colleague and friend, ruggas.co.za.

He posted an excellent piece about something I was not aware of: World Rugby has a regulation that says a “development fee” must be paid when players between the ages of 17 and 23 are transferred between clubs. It stipulates that 5 000 pounds per year that the player was developed by his previous club must go to them in compensation for his being whisked away as an already developed player. That’s a lot of money and the intention is clearly to encourage clubs to develop their own players, not to poach them after others have done that job.

Starting to ring bells?

SA Rugby, which is obliged to follow World Rugby’s rules, has introduced a more thrifty version. When a player is recruited out of school, R1 000 per year must be paid (for a 1^st XV player), R3 000 for one who has played in the Grant Khomo Week, R5 000 for a Craven Week player and R10 000 for an SA Schools player. It’s happening, Ruggas says, but the problem is that the money is going to the provincial unions, not to the schools that actually spotted and developed the players.

If the money went to the school, and was allocated according to the number of years that the player attended the school, it could encourage schools to develop their own talent, not buy it in only in the senior years.

Read the piece - http://www.talk.ruggas.co.za/?p=1153 – it’s illuminating.

The debate this week followed a suggestion that schools should employ agents who would, as I understand it, have the sole mandate over their players and would split the profits made out of getting them contracts with the school. That money can be used to further improve the school’s rugby programme and, it’s suggested, for bursaries to drive transformation.

As I said, I don’t fully understand the financial and legal arrangements and implications, but I can see how, if the World Rugby development fee rule is followed, and given that it will be in the agent’s interest to retain “his” talented players, this can be a disincentive to poaching.

I’m not sure I understand it, but I am certain that I don’t buy it. We are talking about 18 year-old children, remember, and the process starts much earlier. Some say, unbelievably, that there is even “contracting” of players at 12 years of age when they leave primary school. I know that the grade seven year is a major shopping window for rugby bursary-offering high schools.

The answer is simple – keep away and leave the schoolboys alone! Let them leave school, then start treating them like professionals. The “head start” that our excellent school rugby setup is supposed to give us is proving to be myth – if you look at the SA Schools and national under-20 team results – so stop justifying these obviously uneducational and unethical practices in terms of that.

Schools do need money to develop players, especially players from disadvantaged backgrounds, but that should be the responsibility of the sports and education departments. When we start seeing the professionalisation of child players as a source of funding, we are in deep trouble. The best schoolboy coaches teach rugby skills and techniques, but they also want the boys they coach to become good human beings. They don’t need potential earnings and income for the school to be part of that. That isn’t what sport at school is there for.

Quotas and affirmative action are not the same thing

Affirmative action is necessary and justified. It’s accepted as a valid way of giving those who never got the opportunity to reach their potential, unjustly, a chance to make up the shortfall and compete on an equal footing with those who were given every chance to develop.

And in apartheid South Africa, the injustices done weren’t limited to the exclusion of individuals, they were there in everything required by a developing athlete – the education system, coaching, fields and equipment, nutrition and medical support etc.

To expect players from that kind of background to organically come through the ranks simply because those practices are no longer legal, was never going to happen.

So, affirmative action (AA) was applied in sport, and in other areas like employment law, and it was the right thing to do.

Let’s clarify what affirmative action is supposed to mean. In the classical sense, it's about identifying potential in places that have been overlooked in the past and then, as the words imply, taking actions which affirm that potential so that the previously disadvantaged individual has every chance of making it to the top.

Quotas, on the other hand, are something else entirely. In the SA sports selection context, they are there to make it compulsory to include a specified number of players who are not white in a particular team.

Affirmative action is about potential and growth. Quotas are about selection and reward. Sure, selection is part of AA: when faced with two players of equal ability, you are justified in choosing the disadvantaged one, and you are even in your rights to choose a player of lower ability, if you believe he has potential, but has been denied the opportunity to develop to that level.

Eventually, if everyone is doing their job properly, it shouldn’t be necessary to impose a quota at higher representative levels. The players who have been on the AA programme will be able to make teams on their own merits.

And that’s happening all the time. The examples at Protea cricket and Springbok rugby level are obvious. The stars of those teams are not the white players, most of the time. Now not all of those players went through the AA process. Some are from wealthy middle class families where their parents did what was required to let them thrive, others were from poor families where great sacrifices were made to help them succeed. In other words, they were just talented sportsmen who, like everyone else, put in the work, got the support and deserve the rewards.

But that isn’t always the case and many others have made it to the top because they got help along the way in terms of bursaries, extra coaching and, yes, selection above white players who were better than them at that moment.

The problem is that the keyboard warriors on social media, and some others in the wider community, very often regard all black players as quota players and all quota players as undeserving of their selection.

I heard a strange confirmation of that equation on the radio the other day when a professor, advocating for justice in cricket said “the way they play these days you’d think the white players in the Protea team are the quota players.”

People who believe that are accused of being racist, and they generally are. If AA has been implemented properly it should never be an issue – the black players are there on merit, either because they were good enough all along or because they were brought up to speed through an accelerated development programme, which is what AA demands.

But, if the players of colour are there simply to fill the quota and keep the suits happy, and they haven’t been brought along properly, we shouldn’t accept it. And, if they then can’t do the job, then those who are running the show must take the flak.

Where do the black stars disappear to when the season winds down?

Another rugby season’s just about done, and just in time if you ask me.

I’ve taken an interest in the Virseker Cup playoff games up here n Gauteng for a change – I work for a rugby website now and I have to report on something – and I’m also keeping my eye on the big games that seem to be stacked up at the end of the season. It was the Paarl Derby a few weeks ago, Jeppe vs KES and Glenwood vs Grey the week before that and this weekend is the really big one, Grey College vs Paul Roos Gimnasium for the heavyweight crown of SA Schools rugby.

All of those were preceded, of course by the Craven Week. And at the Craven Week, roughly half of the players on display were black and in many of the games the best players on the field were black, and when in the discussions around who stood out were held the names of players of colour were right up there: Gumede, Manyike, Xamlashe, Vlitoor, Ncube – all among the stars of the show, just as in any other year.

As the season wound down however, the teams still in action began to take on a rather bleached look. Sure, the names mentioned above are in the SA Schools team, not playing for their schools, but you have to wonder where the other great black players who were in Paarl have disappeared to. Selborne, KES, Glenwood and Jeppe are exceptions, but in the games I’ve been to in the last three weeks, and the ones I’ve watched on TV, there have been 1 or 2 players of colour, tops, on the field and some of the teams have had none at all.

Now you have to wonder what the justification is for showing, on national TV, a rugby game between two all-white teams in 2018! Worse, you have to ask why the top rugby schools in the land seem to see transformation as not their responsibility, and why they are being allowed to get away with it.

I’m not talking in absolutes here. Of course the top-ranked schools have produced some fabulous players of colour over the years, well they have fielded them, anyway. And that may just be the point – the practice of bringing in black stars, usually from somewhere else, is not transformation. It meets the demands of the compulsory quota and I’ll concede that playing for a top school in their final year or two, against other top schools, plays an important part in turning them into the finished product, but it’s actually about winning games, not about developing human potential.

And if, as seems to be the case at the moment, there are no black stars about that can help them do that, then it seems they are quite happy to go shopping at the white market and field all-white teams.

And the English speaking boys schools are carrying the can. They don’t have enough good old-fashioned Afrikaner meat in their ranks, so they don’t rank right up there consistently, but they are doing fine with teams that are 50%, or more, black. And the provincial teams that those players are being selected for are doing OK at the Craven Week.

The professional teams, and the Springboks, are going to have to field more players of colour, it’s just not useful to argue about that anymore. The way things are going, it doesn’t look like those players are going to be coming from our rugby powerhouse schools, and no-one is doing anything about it. Is that not perhaps why we aren’t competitive at international level anymore?

Give me a ref who lets the boys play, anyday

Did any of you see the Selborne vs Queens College rugby match on the TV last weekend?

I watched a replay during the week. Selborne were brilliant, showing just why they have five players in the SA Schools team, but what really caught my eye was the performance of the referee, Rod Harris. He didn’t look the part. He’s not so young anymore, well he has grey hair anyway, and not as slim and sleek as most referees you see on TV these days, but he was superb.

The clarity of his communication, his application of the advantage law and, most importantly, his attitude, reflected in the way he spoke to the boys was fantastic. I thought while I was watching that here was a referee who realised the players were the stars of the show, not him. I particularly liked the way that he called the teams Queens and Selborne, none of that “white” and “gold” nonsense that straight away puts an impersonal distance between the ref and the players.

I’ve tried to find out who Mr Harris is, without much success other than to find out that he’s a teacher in East London – no surprises there – and a member of the East London Barbarians Referee Society. I called the number listed on their Facebook page, but the man who answered was cagey about them. They are a private organisation, not affiliated to the official Border rugby referees, but other than to say they broke away from Border because of irregularities there, he wouldn’t tell me who or what they are.

No matter, if the reffing style of Rod Harris is what they are all about, more strength to them.

All of this took place in the context of some pretty unpleasant goings-on in schools rugby games in these parts recently.  I was at a game not long ago when a player was red-carded for screaming racist obscenities at the referee, on another occasion I watched boys playing for various teams at a big “derby day” throw punches throughout the morning, following the slightest provocation. And I read scathing reports on the role the referee played (or didn’t play) in a particularly ugly derby game in Pretoria.

It made me think, as I’m prone to do these days, now that I’m in my autumn years, of the time when I was a first team rugby coach and a referee. Maybe it was because the game at school level was not approached as professionally then as it now, but I’m confident that if Rod Harris was around then, he’d have been in great demand. The coaches in the circles I moved in would have told the union to keep their highly qualified, top-rated whistlers and called on him to handle their top games.

There was a small group of referees those days, mostly teachers, who were popular choices because, the people at the schools said, they let the boys play the game, were empathetic and protective of them, much like Rod Harris was on Saturday.

For a while I, for some reason, was one of them. I was a member of the official refs society, but I handled a lot of games without being officially appointed to them. It was all quite amateurish, and by the grace of God, we never had a serious incident that I can remember, but we all quite consciously believed in letting the boys play the game, not in showing how technically perfect we were.

In the new world we find ourselves in now, it’s all about zero tolerance, and following the protocols from here on in. I think that overstructured approach leads to frustration among the players and that contributes to the ugly incidents we see.

No-one on Rod Harris’ field last Saturday would have thrown a punch. All of them, winners and losers, clearly enjoyed the game and my fading eyes never saw a single infringement in the game that was missed by him.