There have been three fairly widely reported incidents lately that have fallen right into the lap of a serial whiner about the state of school rugby like me.
First there was the very dodgy granting of bursaries to primary schools players in KZN, then there was the BBC report on steroid use in our schools and now the story of 17 and 18 year-olds playing in the under-13 primary schools Craven Week.
Cleverer people than me have identified what you need to be a successful sporting team.
You need talented players, obviously, you need good coaching, you need good facilities and equipment and you need regular quality competition that allows you to test your players and systems against good opposition.
You would expect professional sporting setups to meet all those requirements. They are all important, and the 1st two – players and coaching – are generally the difference between the champions and the rest.
In a school rugby context those things are not always guaranteed – not in the vast majority of cases anyway.
In the past schools took in their grade 8s and set about coaching them to be the best that they can. That applied to everyone you played against, and the playing fields were even. Coaching was usually the difference, and given that the available talent was quite randomly distributed it was accepted that even the best schools would sometimes have a poor year.
Greater exposure in the media (and I confess to have played a role in that); the introduction of satellite television with its hunger for 24 hours of sports coverage and then the advent of social media, meant that the results of school first rugby teams became national news. National rankings followed and winning became more and more important.
At around the same time the professionalisation of rugby at national and provincial levels trickled down into the schools. That was a good thing, rugby-wise, but the investment it required made winning even more important.
Of course you play sport to win, and schools have a duty to prepare their teams and players to have the best possible chance of winning. But to what ends do you go?
If you cannot meet the requirements for success, do you accept it and work hard at competing anyway, or do you do what it takes to meet them, even if it means cheating?
Schools are educational institutions, nothing more, nothing less. And educational values demand of them to be ethical and unscrupulously fair in all they do. If you don’t behave that way, you have no right to be in a position where you are influencing and moulding young people.
Once you make winning your dominant value, however, then you are saying that it supersedes educational values and you will do what it takes to win. It means if you don’t have the talent, you go out and buy it from other schools via bursaries and other financial incentives. Then you ensure that you have the best coaching by employing men who have experience at senior provincial level, paying them million-rand packages, at the expense of the parents or out of trust funds or donations which would be far better used in redressing the dire inequality that exists in our schooling system. Likewise, you spend millions on building facilities that are only used by a small sector of the school. And you stop playing your neighbours and design elite national leagues and festivals that include only those who think like you and are prepared to throw money at rugby like you do.
In the highly competitive world of recruitment you start signing up 11 and 12 year-olds, before anyone else can get hold of them. You turn a blind-eye to the gargantuan physical proportions of young players, pretending to believe the bogus birth certificates that indicate they are playing at the right age level. And, at worst, you encourage players to bulk up by using performance enhancing drugs or, at best, you turn a blind eye to that once-slight boy who has gained 10kg of muscle in a short period of time.
Probably worst of all, schools exploit the inequality and poverty that still exists in the country. A bursary to a good high school can be a way out for an impoverished family, and a Varsity Cup or provincial contract can lead to unimagined riches for poor black boys. In the name of transformation and diversity those sorts of players are targeted, and the talented ones are plucked away, and we are told it’s being done for altruistic reasons.
It’s easy to see how those poor families will fight tooth and nail for those opportunities. Is it surprising that some of them might manufacture birth certificates or that the boys may be tempted to take steroids in an attempt to get a foot in the door?
It’s all about winning, and attempts to justify what is going on as educational or child-centered personal development are dishonest.
The Lance Armstrong justification of “everyone is doing it” is quite common, and I’ve been asked what I would do to stop it. I can’t do a thing, except to carry on whingeing about it. But the principals of the schools can. They are responsible for everything that goes on at their schools (including the money spent in the name of the school by old boys and trust funds). They all have to say no more! And they have to mean it and act honourably from then on.
It's not impossible. It’s actually what they are being paid to do.
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