Selection - the way things are

I’m going out on a limb here and I’m probably going to get bliksemed, so I’ll get my excuse in upfront: there’s a difference between the way things should be and the way they are.

I’m going to be talking about the latter – the way it is. You may not agree with the way things work, but that’s not going to change anything.

The topic, as usual, is school rugby and it’s relevant at this time as the various provinces announce their selected teams ahead of the various Youth Weeks in July.

There’s been a bit of a hoo-hah in my hometown around the composition of the under-18 teams, particularly the “A” Craven Week side. It is dominated, numerically, by players from one school and there are three teams in the province who would most likely beat them comfortably – one of them has – yet they have markedly fewer representatives in the provincial shadow team.

I’m sure similar situations exist in other provinces around the country.

In the instance I’m talking about, the final selection hasn’t been announced yet, but it won’t change much. If you buy my argument below you’ll agree that it can’t.

Here’s where what is and what should be, start butting heads. In a perfect world, rugby-wise, the pecking order in number of representatives will follow the ranking order of the top three or four teams, and they will all have played each other, to make that ranking accurate. Then there may or may not be a few exceptional outliers from other schools included in the mix.

But they don’t all play each other around here and, anyway, team selection is way more complicated than that. There are trials of course, where players are expected to shine as individuals, and there’s been an elite player squad going since shortly after last year’s provincial season, so the coaches and selectors have access to measured physical attributes and skills levels for most of the top players.

In a perfect world, again, those things will contribute to getting team selections right, rugby-wise. But it’s not a perfect world, is it? And the biggest issue – one that those railing at the unfairness of an inferior team supplying most of the players don’t mention – is the compulsory quota system that is in place.

Officially, it’s a target not a quota, but in reality it’s not negotiable and every team complies with it. For the 2019 under-18 Craven Week, the under-18 Academy Week and the under-16 Grant Khomo and Academy Weeks, the target is 12 players of colour in each 23-man squad (50% plus 1). And the contentious selection I’m talking about meets that requirement, with the majority of players from the school in question being black.

In that perfect world, again, SA Rugby-driven development programmes, sufficient funding of coaches and equipment and rugby schools in each province who are committed to transforming their 1^st teams would have led, by now, to a situation where having half the teams made up of black players wouldn’t be an issue. The talent is there, no-one denies that, and the majority of the good players will come from the majority of the population. That’s just common sense.

But rugby doesn’t exist in that world. Instead, most of the provinces scrape and scramble to meet that compulsory quota, and this is reflected in their performance at the Craven Week. They may have the top schools in their regions, but if those schools field teams that are made up predominantly of white players, and if they don’t go to the trouble and expense to diversify their elite player base, they will be at a disadvantage.

Recent Craven Week history shows that four provinces have emerged as the top contenders: Western Province, The Golden Lions, The Sharks and Eastern Province. What distinguishes those teams from the others is the quality of their black players.

In the case of WP and EP it’s organic – those are the areas where rugby has a history of rugby as a sport of choice among black children and where many schools in the township areas play the game. Strong, formerly white, schools and black players who are selected on merit, that’s the formula for success.

That history doesn’t exist in Gauteng, or in KwaZulu-Natal. In those parts of the country success has largely been the result of affirmative action. Proper affirmative action, not just a selection policy that inserts the requisite number of black players into representative teams.

Proper affirmative action is about seeking out and finding potential and then taking action to affirm it. It means forking out for bursaries to lure talented players to your school. Then it requires giving them special attention in terms of coaching, socialisation, pastoral care, academic support and provision of rugby opportunities.

That’s how you level the playing field. It isn’t easy, and you will take knocks along the way, but at the end of the process you will, hopefully, have rugby players who can hold their own at the Craven Week and – as has happened quite often – who turn out to be the stars of the show.

Sure, those schools may not be able to beat the top dogs in their towns, but they will be where a large proportion those 12 players of colour who have to go to the Craven Week will come from.

That’s just common sense. If you are sending 12 or 13 white players to the trials, only a few of them are going to make it, even if you think they are better than some of those who are selected. Don’t complain, that’s just the way things are.

Online registration is not the answer to our schooling woes

So the Gauteng Department of Education’s online registration process got under way on Monday.

I’m afraid I’m conflicted on the issue – I know that there are schools who use lack of capacity as an excuse for hanging on to exclusivity, which in the South African context means keeping children of a certain race or social category out – but I also acknowledge that there are diversionary tactics at work here: the government is using the “all schools belong to everyone” line to cover up the fact that in 25 years they have done little to improve the overall supply of quality school education.

Instead their answer is to make well-functioning schools in the suburbs admit kids from areas quite remote from them where the schools are dysfunctional.

Gauteng MEC for Education Panyazi Lesufi tweeted on Monday, in response to the common assertion that the online recruitment policy is a way of bringing the top down rather that lifting the bottom up:

If your ancestors didn’t give us gutter education dysfunctional schools won’t exist. Beside, all schools belong to all our children. Gauteng is the number Province in terms of education so your accusation is baseless. Out of the top 10 Districts in the country 8 are in Gauteng

He’s right. Apartheid education was designed to produce inferior schooling and the underperforming, dysfunctional system that we are saddled with has its origins there.

To redress those massive, intentional imbalances was never going to be easy, even in 25 years. I’m not so arrogant to suggest that I know what should be done, but I do think that as a tax-payer, one who has education at heart, I have the right to expect an honest attempt to at least get on the right road to recovery.

I’m afraid the current state of affairs doesn’t provide much evidence to support that having happened. Mr Lesufi’s insinuation that the schools in Gauteng aren’t dysfunction based on the fact that Gauteng achieved the top overall pass rate in the matric exams at the end of last year doesn’t really tell the story.

In the first instance, it’s based on just that one measure – the grade 12 examination. The ANA (annual national assessments) were dropped in 2015, remember, at the insistence of the teacher union, SADTU, who recognised that they were a way of holding their members accountable for their performance.

I’ll speak later about what I think can be done to eliminate the equality without lowering standards at the performing schools, but a good place to start would be to break the power of SADTU. Get all the teachers to do their jobs and, without doing anything else, there will be a significant and immediate improvement.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of the throughput rate. The Matric pass rate may be rising, but we should remember that only about 40%, on average, of the kids who began school 12 years earlier actually go right through to the end of the grade 12 year and the final exams. Taking that into consideration the 75% pass rate published is probably closer to 50%. And research has shown that the province with the highest pass rates have had the biggest decline in numbers of learners writing the final exams.

So, maybe things are going as well in Gauteng as what the MEC would have us believe.

The bottom line is that we have too many schools that aren’t functioning properly. The children exiting those schools, without a quality education, are largely doomed to unemployment and poverty. That’s a major factor in the ongoing inequality in the land.

Making the schools in the suburbs, who are functioning well take in those children won’t solve the problem. They will never have the capacity to do so and, yes, they do want to maintain their standards – standards that are often dependent on the financial support of parents and alumni.

Changing the rules governing intake to allow the kids from the townships to attend them is a good thing, in principle, especially is those schools are being intentionally elitist and reactionary. But it would be a better thing to fix the township schools so the kids can get an equally good education in the communities they live in.

It’s the responsibility of a community to raise its children. The school should be at the centre of the community with the teachers, parents and community organisations all contributing to the cause.

A child who travels for an hour and a half each way, via two taxis, to a school on the other side of town is at a disadvantage. And it’s just about impossible for her parents to become part of that school community.

So, what can be done? Well, as I said you can rein the unions in. Then you can invest in leadership development for principals. There isn’t a good school that doesn’t have a good leader. The outlier schools in the townships that produce great results with limited resources can inevitably be explained by the presence of a principal who insists on excellence and who leads his/her team to achieve it.

Most importantly, the children need to attend the local school. That way the community can work together to raise them. That’s the only way it can be done properly.

The high-tech online registration system, as well-intentioned as it may be, is working directly against that.

The downside of having super schools

A downside to the emergence of rugby “super” schools was always going to be the decline and possible demise of the rest.

Not all schools have the resources, or the desire, to become rugby powerhouses and so they have lagged behind. Parents of talented boys who want them to develop into good players no longer send their sons to the local high school like they used to in the old days and those who do start off there may well move to a better rugby programme elsewhere later on. Most switch of their own accord, but some are lured by bursaries and other financial incentives.

The result has been an ever-widening gap, rugby wise, between the top and the bottom schools to the extent that they no longer play against each other any more.

It’s been happening for a while now and it’s reflected in the fixture lists. 20 years ago Jeppe, for instance, would have played schools like Sandringham, Highlands North, Potch Boys’ High and Athlone. Those schools underwent rapid demographic transformation and rugby fell by the wayside. That’s understandable and inevitable What’s more disturbing, though, is that schools that have run healthy rugby programmes in the past are battling to cope now.

That’s been apparent over the last two weekends in Joburg as the private schools returned from their holidays and are scheduled to meet the powerhouses – Jeppe, KES, Pretoria Boys’ High. While they were away, the big state boys schools played each other, or met similar level schools from other provinces – Affies, Westville etc, and some of them will play each other again later in the year.

Now, however, they have Saturdays to fill and the opposition they are facing is not up to it. Sure, they are competitive at 1st team and age group A team level, but they don’t field as many teams in each age group as the big schools do and because it’s always been a numbers game, their Bs and Cs are getting creamed. There have been “whitewash” fixtures and 60 plus score lines and that’s not good for anyone, winners or losers.

Any mother who watches her son - who is probably being far outweighed by the opposition week after week - and sees his team lose by 50 points three weeks in a row would be justified in withdrawing him from rugby.

One private boys school, one that has produced many provincial players over the years, has declared that this might well be their last season of rugby. That’s deeply disturbing.

It’s a complicated issue, and there’s no blame to be assigned. The big rugby schools field 20 plus teams each week, they are all well coached, and they want all of them to play games regularly. The smaller schools have allowed the numbers to dwindle, for whatever reason, to the extent that they cannot supply enough opposition anymore.

It’s not unique to our schools rugby. Exactly the same issues were raised recently in New Zealand recently following a report which found that overall numbers of kids playing rugby were dropping, and that fewer schools were offering the sport.

The top schools apply the latest scientific developments, they have top coaches and the boys work very hard. We all know that success doesn’t happen automatically. Their teams play rugby that is a joy to watch and, naturally, the bulk of the selected provincial players will come from them.

You can’t expect them to back down on the excellent development they are providing. The problem, though, is that they will pretty soon have no-one to play against on a weekly basis (except each other). That would mean the end of the traditional local fixture system, but it will also mean a narrowing of the player base, and that can’t be good for the game.

There’s not much that can be done about it now. The irony, though, is that while our top schools have shown themselves to be among the best in the world, the rest of the school rugby system is crumbling.

KES vs Jeppe is a proper derby

It was the great screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, who said that if you repeat something you have written yourself and published before, it’s not plagiarism.

He was talking about common expressions that have been repeated, quite often sometimes, in his TV series and movies. I’m a big fan and they were great lines, worthy of the repetition, I thought.

So I, not that I can compare myself to Sorkin in any way, am going to do the same and rehash a piece that I wrote before.

It’s about the top school rugby derbies – and it’s relevant this week because the whole North Eastern side of Joburg is in a tizzy ahead of Saturday’s game between Jeppe and KES. And I guess it’s the same in South of Cape Town where SACS will be hosting Bishops this weekend.

Here’s how I started it:

Some time last year one of the school sport websites ran a poll asking its readers to name what they saw as the biggest schoolboy rugby derbies in the country.

Not surprisingly, the Paarl derby – Paarl Gimnasium v Paarl Boys’ High – came out tops. Second was K-Day, the Grahamstown clash between St Andrew’s College and Kingswood, and third was Jeppe v King Edward.

I’ve been never been to K-Day, although I have been fortunate to attend the Paarl inter-schools game, and I’m off to Jeppe this morning to watch another KES-Jeppe encounter – I guess I’ve been to just about every one of them in the last 20 years.

My views will always be biased, based on personal experience, and I suspect that the Grahamstown derby was elevated in importance by the volume of votes cast in the poll by old boys of the schools involved.

There is simply nothing like that game in Paarl. The entire town is either blue or maroon, even the trees are bandaged in the colours of the respective schools and the buildup to the game runs for weeks beforehand. It is played at the town stadium, which is always filled to capacity.

In my experience, the second biggest local derby is Pretoria Boys’ High v Affies. It’s a derby in the purest form of the term – between schools that share a fence line, more of that later. There’s a tribal intensity to it and the results down the years have shown that playing record going into the game is not necessarily an indicator of what’s going to happen on the day.

Oddly, the Pretoria derby doesn’t make the top five in the poll, maybe that’s because the website didn’t have too many Afrikaans-speaking readers to vote for it.

And third is today’s clash (KES vs Jeppe). This is (was then) the 79^th time the match has been played and, if anything, it’s getting bigger year by year. There isn’t the close proximity of schools that you get in Pretoria, but it’s similar to the Paarl game in the traditional socio-economic status of the communities involved.

Things have changed over the years and schools no longer draw pupils from their immediate surroundings, but the Paarl schools, in the past, were referred to as “onder-dorp” and “bo-dorp”: upper and lower town, the wine farmers vs the townsfolk. There’s a conflict there that adds spice to the encounter.

Similarly, today’s clash is Houghton v Jeppestown, Northern v Southern Joburg. The fact that the boys now come from all over town, and many of the rugby players from all over the country, notwithstanding. The contrast in origins is something the old boys like to shout about – in a nice way – and it makes for a great occasion.

I then went on to explain the origin of the term “derby game" and how it comes from Liverpool. The Everton v Liverpool football match was the original derby game. It was first played in 1894 and called the derby because the clubs were located on opposite ends of Stanley Park – the estate of the Earl of Derby.

The Liverpool derby

On that basis, King Edward vs St John’s is a better derby, as was Jeppe v Athlone, in the days when the Bez Valley School was a rugby powerhouse. Grey College v Paul Roos Gimnasium – cited by many as the biggest derby of all – is not a derby game at all.

But, KES and Jeppe are neighbors – no question - and it’s going to be standing room only at Jeppe on Saturday. You won’t witness more commitment from the players in any other sporting event in town. You can’t argue with that.

The Jeppe vs KES derby

The top five derbies listed in that poll were: 1 Paarl Gimnasium vs Paarl Boys High,2 Kingswood College vs St Andrew’s College, 3 KES vs Jeppe, 4 Bishops vs Rondebosch, 5 Hilton vs Michaelhouse.