The percentages are up, but is that rugby transformation?

Team selection is based on achievement, it reflects excellence and form, and rewards the work and effort players put in to stand out from their peers.

Well, at least that is what it should be. We know that the best players sometimes don’t get selected. There’s partiality on the part of selectors who have vested interests, there’s bias and favouritism and yes, there are racial quotas which have to be adhered to. But the principle stands: selection is based on current and past performance.

Affirmative action operates at the other end of the process. It’s about potential and about giving the opportunity to achieve at some time in the future to individuals who would otherwise not get such an opportunity.

The two are not the same thing and when you select players for representative teams on the basis of skin colour and call it affirmative action you are missing the boat, and not doing anyone any favours.

In this country no lover of rugby can object to affirmative action – we can never reach our full potential if there are talented players who are being denied the chance to develop to their true potential  – but at the same time no lover of the game can be satisfied with the practice of forcing selectors to pick black players simply to meet numerical targets.

Affirmative action requires that you identify players with potential, make sure they get into the system and then take action to make sure they get the coaching and encouragement required to become good enough to be chosen on merit. That includes, when there is little to choose between two players, opting for the black one.

Rugby’s that kind of game. You need coaching, facilities and equipment and you need to play against quality opposition if you want to develop into a good player. The reason why the majority of Springboks (black and white) come from a handful of schools is because they get those things at those schools.

At those top schools the natural talent of the black players comes through and as a result a large proportion of the best players at the Craven Week, year after year, are black boys from schools like that. So, the SA Schools team and the SA under-20s, chosen according to a strict quota, can play against the top international teams and shine. What should be happening at the same time is that the coaching, facilities and competition levels at all schools should be lifted via a coherent development structure. No such thing exists.

Which brings me to SA Rugby’s recent back self-slapping statement declaring that they made significant progress in 2019 in terms of the transformation of the game in South Africa.

The gist of it was that their transformation barometer had leapt to 81% success in 2019, from 59% the year before. Success was achieved in 38 of the 47 areas of measurement set out in its Strategic Transformation Development Plan 2030 (STDP 2030).

That sounds impressive and seems to indicate that we are well on the way to reaching the goal that many of us a striving for – a time when rugby teams can be selected entirely on merit and, at the same time reflect the racial composition of the population.

It’s clear from what you see and hear, however, that we are still a long way from that. I wanted to see what the percentages quoted in the SA Rugby statement meant, so I downloaded the STDP 2030 document from their website. It’s a serious publication, glossy and well-designed and running to 60 pages long, and it’s all about race.

Four dimensions are laid out: Dimension 1: Access to the game; Dimension 2: Skills and Capacity Development; Dimension 3: Demographic Representation; Dimension 4: Performance; Dimension 5: Community Development and Social Responsibility and Dimension 6: Corporate Governance.

How the provinces are performing relative to targets set in each of these is the basis of the evaluation. What they mean by that is what percentage of players, coaches, referees and officials etc are black. And what black means is clearly spelt out. There are Black Africans - Black African South African citizens and Black people - a generic term used to refer to African, Indian, and Coloured South African citizens. The distinction is important when it comes to team selection targets and quotas.

The numbers certainly are up and, it seems, SA Rugby is quite proud of that. The problem is that there’s no distinction drawn between selection and affirmative action. How many of those black rugby people are there because their potential was identified and they were trained mentored and guided; and how many were selected because of a quota which had to be complied with?

For proper, sustainable transformation to happen, systems have to be put in place that bring people through the ranks in numbers. That costs money and takes hard work – it’s far easier to tell everyone, as STDP 2030 does, that you have to meet the numbers. When they do that, and the targets are met in that way, it seems a little hollow to be bragging about it via press releases.

Hand school sport back to the community

We are all quite fond of the maxim ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ even though there isn’t much evidence that shows that children are actually brought up that way these days. To start with, we haven’t lived in villages for hundreds of years, and in this age of extreme caution and hyper political-correctness it would probably be ill-advised to try to interfere with the way other people are raising their kids.

American author Peter Block is an authority on the power of the community and he advocates for communities to take responsibility for the raising of their children. He argues that our children aren’t raised by communities anymore. Instead we pay systems to raise our children – teachers, counsellors, coaches, youth workers, nutritionists, doctors etc.

We also pay service providers to treat and comfort the ill, for our safety and to take care of the elderly: all things, according to Block, that were taken care of in the community once. In the process we fall prey to smart marketing and advertising and we are manipulated into wanting things by those who are making money from the system.

Modern schooling is part of that. People chase after success and achievement and are prepared to pay for it, sometimes very dearly. It’s apparent everywhere in education, including sport. Few will argue with the principle that school sport is part of the educational process and, therefore, part of raising a child. There are no villages anymore, but there are communities and I would argue that a school is part of its community and through its sporting programme the school, together with the community it serves, has a responsibility to guide children on their path to responsible adulthood.

A school cannot abdicate that responsibility, neither can it outsource it. You can bring in coaches and conditioning experts and buy the best equipment. You can professionalise your programme, and that will bring positive results, and that’s fine. But if paid-for elements of the consumer system take control of the process you are heading for disaster, and the road to hell, in this case, is paved with the good intentions of the new media that praises to the heavens the professionalisation of sport at school level, and calls for more and more of it.

A professional programme will produce excellent young players and some of them will go on to play at higher levels. Only a fraction will make it, though, and at some stage you have to question the amount of money spent on them, and wonder about the rest of the players. As a school community you have a responsibility to raise all your children, not just the stars, especially if many of those stars aren’t part of your community but were brought in from somewhere else.

In any organised game the whole point is to win. You’d be wasting everyone’s time, and it would be an insult to your opponents if you went into competition without trying to be victorious. Teachers and coaches wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t prepare their teams with the goal of winning games in mind.

The question of course is how far you are prepared to go. Winning matches is certainly the aim, but do you make winning your dominant value? Honourable men, remember, are prepared to die for their values. That’s ridiculous, of course, but when you make winning the value by which you live, then you have no choice but to do everything you can to win. You have to win at all costs.

And that’s where it all begins. Take rugby. The spirit of the game, demands certain standards of ethical behaviour and sportsmanship. These are even spelt out in the Playing Charter which forms part of the Laws of The Game.

CONDUCT

These are the boundaries within which players and referees must operate and it is the capacity to make this fine distinction, combined with control and discipline, both individual and collective, upon which the code of conduct depends.

SPIRIT

Rugby owes much of its appeal to the fact that it is played both to the letter and within the spirit of the laws. The responsibility for ensuring that this happens lies not with one individual - it involves coaches, captains, players and referees.

The spirit of the law isn’t spelt out, but it’s one of those things that you recognise in its absence – you can see when something happens that’s just not within the right spirit. In cricket those unwritten laws have become a metaphorical way of describing human nature as a whole – we all know what is meant when someone says “It’s just not cricket”.

So, do you push the boundaries of good conduct, and do you disregard the spirit of the law because there’s nothing written down anyway and there can be no repercussions? If you believe in winning at all costs then you have to.

Schools are educational institutions, nothing else. Rugby at school level is part of the educational process and it falls under the principal. It doesn’t matter if there’s a trust that’s funding bursaries, or if the old boys are paying the salary of the coach, the principal is in charge, and takes responsibility for everything that involves the school.

And the principal is expected to make education the priority. That’s not optional, it’s his job. Every decision has to be educationally accountable – is the action taken in the best interests of the learners? There’s no room for debate in that. It’s educationally sound to insist that all boys sent out onto the rugby field are well-taught, conditioned and have the necessary skills. The principal can demand from the coaches that the teams are motivated, and have a desire to win. That’s part of sport, and it wouldn’t be educational to allow teams to go into games without caring about the result.

But when winning becomes the dominant value, educational considerations are often abandoned, along with the spirit of the game. More skillful, better-conditioned players are obviously a good thing and if a school’s high quality rugby programme sets a player on the path to a professional career ending up with first class or national honours, then that school has done its job in terms of vocational preparation and it has reason to be proud. Achieving these things requires a professional approach and as long as that approach is educationally accountable, every step of the way, then you cannot fault it.

It generally isn’t, however. Often the professional, rugby academy way of doing things is described as putting the player and his holistic education first, but when you don’t have to dig too deeply to discover that the real rationale is producing players who can help the school’s teams win matches. It’s part of the win at all costs outlook and school principals, I’m afraid, aren’t always entirely honest about it. They will speak about educational values, but are quite happy to allow all sorts of things happen, as long as the teams keep winning.

When the school commoditises sport provision and pays money to people from outside of the community to run its rugby programmes it is usually doing so because it wants to win. The website coverage, national rankings and social media attention reinforce the notion that a school’s value is tied to the performance of its 1^st rugby team, so winning becomes all important.

The raising of the children by the community has been taken over by the professionals and because it’s a case of win at any cost, the costs, financial and in the proper educational development of the children become irrelevant.

There are all sorts of mean-spirited, unethical, illegal and downright practices that follow, all in the name of winning. Scorched Earth recruitment practices, specialisation and over-training and substance abuse are only some of those.

The obscene amounts of money it takes to run school rugby professionally probably won’t be there when the pandemic is over. It’s the perfect time to hand the raising of the children back to the community, with the school playing a central role in that and to send the professionals to the professional game where they belong.