I was trawling around, looking for something to crack wise
about when this was announced today:
There’s going to be, they say, an SA Schools Rugby Challenge
competition from 2021, involving the eight “top” schools in the land in a
13-team per school league, with points awarded and a champion school
determined.
Many South African sports fans seem to be obsessed with the
idea that every sporting activity needs to be run as a formal competition, with
an eventual winner being determined. I get that, there’s certainly little point
in playing a game if winning is not the aim. I do believe, however, that organising
sport at schools along those lines is wrong. Schools are educational
institutions and their sports activities are part of their educational
programmes, that’s non-negotiable. There are way too many examples of the things
that can go wrong when winning rather than development becomes the dominant
value.
And the SA Schools Challenge will be about winning. That
raises all sorts of red flags and the biggest one is that it will focus and amplify
the identification and recruitment of the top talent available and further funnel it into a handful of schools.
The fact that the preliminary statement put out by the organisers
speaks of excluding players who begin at a school after the first few weeks of
their grade 11 year shows that they anticipate that player movement between
schools and poaching can be an issue. However, the fact that this exclusion
only applies to the under-19 section shows that they don’t object to the
practice in principle, they just want to regulate the timing of it.
There hasn’t been any talk of prize money or TV coverage but
I’m sure that those are on the agenda. It’s going to be so important to the
schools involved to win that they will have to ensure that they have the right
players in their ranks. And that, recently history has shown, has resulted in a
scorched earth approach to talent identification with little concern for the
schools that the recruited players come from.
The attempt by the competition’s spokesperson to show that
it isn’t an elitist exercise because the schools will use other, lesser, rugby
schools as “fillers” when they can’t meet their fixture obligations, apart from
being condescending and partronising, is surely dangerous to those schools. Won’t
they be giving the top school a good look at their players? And for how long will
they be retaining the best of them?
There are two reasons for running a rugby programme at a
school: to further educate your learners via the sport, and to promote the
development of the sport on a wider scale. Doing what it will take to be successful
in a competition such as this one will meet neither of those requirements.
It isn’t a single story, of course. Schools do have an
obligation to give their star performers every opportunity to shine. A few of
them may have a future as professional players and they need all of them to act as role
models and motivators for the younger players coming through.
This leads me to another issue. The Craven Week, the platform
on which the stars were seen in the past is under threat. It was also announced
on Sunday that the future of the interprovincial schools week is in doubt:
It’s about sponsorship, SA Rugby says, but the week was
losing relevance in the eyes of the top schools anyway. The emphasis has moved
to development, with increasingly stringent quotas being introduced, leaving
fewer and fewer places for white players. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, in
fact it’s probably right, but the Craven Week is not what it used to be.
It’s led to festivals like the Wildeklawer and the various
North-South long weekends becoming more and more prestigious. Given that schools
have a responsibility to their top players, they support events like those
where they play against the other top ones. Those are festivals, without
winners though. Hence the SA Schools Rugby Challenge.
There are going to be some great games to watch, but not, I
suspect, much ethical education on show.
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