2021's highights

Top 10 2021

This is the week – the one after the Khaya Majola Week – that usually I compile my list of highlights of the school sporting year that’s ended. There was no Khaya Majola festival last year -  there was no school sports year. So I couldn’t do the exercise in 2020.

That this pensioner had no “misty water-coloured memories” to look back on last year is of no consequence at all in the context of the real tragedies that unfolded in the Covid-19 pandemic. That the boys and girls never go the chance to play was, however, sad and detrimental to their physical and emotional development (although I believe they learnt all sorts of other important lessons by going through a year like that).

Thankfully 2021, though still disrupted, had a semblance of normality about it and there were events and achievements to look back on. That those happened at all has to be the biggest highlight of all and there were unsung heroes everywhere. The children kept on training, the coaches kept on coaching and the organisers went to incredible lengths to make matches happen in a regulatory environment that was changing all the time.

So, that’s highlight number one – keeping the flame burning when it would have been easier to let it go out and do other things.

1 The Saints Sportfest.

In October St Stithians hosted an abbreviated version of its annual sports festival. The codes on offer had to be adjusted – soccer and seven-a-side rugby had the biggest entries – and no spectators were allowed. There were a couple of hundred boys and girls in action, however, and they experienced some of the magic of playing in a big festival and received some of the largesse of the sponsors, Standard Bank. If the whole thing was called off again this year no-one would have blamed the school and those who worked at the festival would have had the long weekend off. They didn’t though, the kids competed and it was glorious.

2 St Benedict’s rowing 

The hardy perennial. There were no SA Schools Championships in 2021, so Bennies could not add to their tally of 27 consecutive boys section titles – the latest of which was won in 2020, just before the big lockdown. They did, however win everything they were able to compete in this year, culminating in the overall boys title at the Gauteng Champs and a resounding victory for their 1st eight at the SA Schools boat race. It’s an ongoing success story with no end in sight.

3 SA Schools Water Polo 

Our schools interprovincial tournament was one of the national events that did take place, with spectators, nogal. It was recently named the biggest youth interprovincial tournament in the world, and to organise it, and to run it successfully, under the ever-present cloud of cancellation through government intervention or a mass breakout of infections in the teams, was a huge highlight. The games were live-streamed on SuperSport Schools and there was a social media poster in Cape Town who kept me, and other lovers of the game, I’m sure, interested and engaged throughout.

4 Western Province Schools water polo

WP showed, at the tournament above, that they are still the best school water polo province, across the board. They won, for the umpteenth year in a row, the trophy for the province winning the most medals. The took nine – four gold, two silver and three bronze – in the 10 sections. Next best were Gauteng with six medals (four gold and two bronze).

5 OJ Eagles

Gauteng are still, however, the best senior mens water polo province. OJ Eagles, representing the province at the SA National Championships, won the title for the fifth year in a row, and the 16th in the last 18 times the tournament was played. Their Roarke Olver was named player of the tournament.

6 Our directors of sport

If the Covid restrictions showed us anything, it was that we don’t have to look at competitive sport in the same way as we have for the last 20 years anymore. In fact, some don’t believe things will ever be quite the same again. Take interschool fixtures. In the past the big schools believed they had to set their dates a year in advance. This year they were arranging matches on the fly, sometimes even on the day of the game. And while traditional fixtures are important, sometimes you play whoever is available. The directors of sport at the various schools are the real heroes. They worked incredibly hard to give their charges as many opportunities to play, often without knowing if the games they were arranging would actually take place. 

7 Friendly Athletics

There were no athletic interhighs in Joburg this year, but one of my sporting highlights was the Wednesday afternoon when Jeppe hosted an athletics meeting open to whoever wanted to run. A team from Springs Boys’ High even turned up, as well as individuals from the local independent schools who were only just back from their holidays. There were no medals and no points tally was kept, and in some events there were as many heats as there were runners wanting to race. Everyone tried their best and everyone enjoyed themselves. School sport’s good side, I thought.

8 Game Changers

Two game-changing developments at Joburg state schools were revealed during the year and they will make it possible for the two – King Edward and Jeppe – to compete with the well-resourced independent schools whose spending power has seen them draw ahead in recent years. The Mark Stevens Aquatic Centre at KES is an indoor pool that will allow year-round training and put the school back on the map in swimming and water polo. The funding came from a generous old boy. At Jeppe, Damascus – a state-of-the-art Swift Carbon Elite Eight boat - was bought for the school by their Jeppe Boats and Blades Trust. It cost half a million, which was raised by the trust, during the lockdown. Jeppe’s 1st eight will be able to race against the high-tech boats of the private schools from now on.

9 Golden Lions U-20s

There was no Craven Week, and very little school rugby played this year, so I had to go the next level – the SA Rugby under-20 championship, which was won by the Golden Lions, for a highlight. There was a strong Joburg schools presence in the team in including two players from Monument – Izan Esterhuizen and Henco van Wyk; two from KES – Ngia Selengbene and Connor van Buuren, and three from Jeppe – Subusiso Shongwe, Justin Kalamar and Setshaba Mokoena.

10 Two Olympians at KES

King Edward VII School had two current learners who went to Tokyo in 2021. Sprint sensation Lythe Pillay, in his matric year, was in the 4 x 400m relay team at the Olympic games in July, while16-year-old Puseletso Mabote made it into the final of the T63 100m, and competed in the long jump, at the Paraylmpics in August.

I've had a look at the new face of schooling

 

The traditional “chalk and talk” style of schooling is incredibly resilient.

 Teaching and learning in schools around the world have been carrying on in much the same way since early in the last century. The colonial empires that ruled most of the world, and imposed their schooling systems on the children in the countries that they had appropriated, are gone now, yet those educational practices remain.

 The English schooling system was transplanted into South Africa and its aim was to produce loyal subjects of the Crown and good colonial citizens of the Empire. Those intentions were well illustrated at the end of the South African (Anglo-Boer) War with the creation of the so-called Milner Schools. The British colonial authorities established a series of schools that were meant to Anglicise the children in the Transvaal and halt the influence of Afrikaans in the province.

 Those political sentiments changed – although schooling was still used for nefarious political ends by the Apartheid government – but the pedagogical methods that were used in their service are pretty much still with us.

 The idea that the teacher is the source of knowledge and teaching was about transferring that knowledge to the children was underpinned by the operational set up of schools and by their architectural design. 

 After 1948, political control passed into the hands of Afrikaners, and the church-led education that was provided to black children was replaced by State-controlled Apartheid education, but the method of teaching children remained the same.

 In the meantime, technological advances made it possible to change everything, but still nothing really changed.

 Maybe what was needed was an era-ending event (ERE), something so big and disruptive that nothing could ever be the same again, to finally free schooling from the shackles.

 As the Covid-19 pandemic surges on, with no signs of abating any time soon, there are those who are calling it an ERE. The closure of schools and the move to digital, online teaching that resulted, certainly forced educationalists to relook at the way they were doing things, and there was a lot of innovation, and a sudden awareness of what was possible with the technology that already exists.

 The students are back at school, for now, and it seems some sort of blended model, consisting of face-to-face contact and virtual classrooms will be the way that those schools who have the resources will go in the future.

There are online schools springing up – institutions that are entirely virtual – and they are certainly different. But are they the answer? What about socialisation and community interaction, what about simply hanging out with your friends?

Someone who has always been acutely aware of all these issues is Shaun Fuchs. He’s been a principal, a manager of a group of schools, and the chief executive of a private schools organisation. He’s been asking himself why this disruption can’t be used positively by re-imagining what a school looks like and re-arranging how it’s organised so that the age-old traditional model is destroyed, the new technology is used to best effect and the children are placed in the centre of it all.

He did more than ask about it; he put his reputation and livelihood on the line and built a school at which all that can happen. Last week he invited me to come and take a look at it.

It’s not completely finished – the first children arrive in January 2022 – but there’s enough already there to see that it’s going to be something very special.

Shaun has started a company called Centennial Schools – the one I went to in Sunninghill, Sandton, is the first in what he is confident will become a national chain – and he has converted an office park to become the physical site where it’s all going to happen, and appointed a principal and initial staff (it will open with Grade 7, 8 and 9 classes next year).

 The existing building has been gutted and its interior converted but, significantly, there have been no major structural alterations. “We have clear ideas about how the learning areas should operate,” he said, “but beyond that we have adapted to the available spaces. That will apply when we move into other premises around the country – no two schools will be the same.”

The architectural stereotypes of schools are a reflection of their pedagogical philosophy, Shaun believes. “The traditional classroom with its rows of desks and the teacher’s table up front reflects the power dynamics in those spaces, and the way in which students are supposed to learn. We will have learning hubs, not classrooms, there is no front or back, and there is a variety of chairs and tables which can be arranged in a way suited to the activities taking place at the time.”

The learning hubs belong to the students – they decide how they want to position themselves in them, and the teachers, who all have their own offices elsewhere, come to them. Each pair of hubs has a shared space called a collaboration hub in between them in which shared teaching and learning activities can take place.

“Our classroom design is student-centred and dynamic. Time and space are being completely reimagined and the student is at the core,” Shaun said.

There are also creative hubs designed for design and innovation, a chill zone, a cafeteria that looks like an upmarket coffee shop, a gym and a yoga studio.

The pedagogical philosophy is based on self-learning. “Our teachers are not lecturers, but rather facilitators who guide our students towards knowledge gathering, sense-making and application,” Shaun said. “Teenagers need the opportunity to exercise choice and experiment with independence in ways that ease them into the demands of early adulthood.”

That philosophy is underpinned by a state-of-the-art school management system called Engage. It manages all aspects of the school’s operation, including the presentation of the curriculum. The entire learning programme is posted online, using a blend of the best of various online learning systems, so the content is up there, and it remains there all year.

“The teachers aren’t responsible for transmitting facts and figures in class, but for ways of leading the students to discover, interpret and apply the facts for themselves,” Shaun said. “This allows for a seamless switching over to virtual teaching should the Covid-19 regulations demand it, and the students are also able to miss lessons for valid reasons without falling behind on the work.”

The ability to catch up on your own has made another unique feature possible – the opportunity to, occasionally, take a “time out”. “The stresses and pressures on teenagers can be overwhelming so we allow them to break away for a few minutes to get their balance. They have to let the teacher know, via a classmate, and they undertake to catch up on the work they have missed. Those sessions are recorded on the Engage system, so they can’t be abused, and if they happen too frequently the student is flagged and counselling assistance can be given.

A school inside an office complex doesn’t have space for sports fields, but that doesn’t mean Centennial isn’t aware of the value of extra-curricular activities. “Conditioning and exercise are taken care of in our fully equipped gym and outdoor exercise area, and we have the yoga studio. A qualified exercise scientist will run those programmes.

There will be encouragement and support for students who want to participate in traditional team and individual sports at local clubs and there are clubs catering for a wide range of those in close proximity to the school.

An extra-curricular area in which Centennial will be streets ahead of other schools is e-sports. The Sunninghill campus will have the biggest e-sports arena in the country where recreation and competitive activities will be presented, on state-of-the art equipment, under the guidance of a professional gamer.

Shaun Fuchs seemed a bit stressed at first when I met with him. Creating innovative and progressive educational places isn’t new for him – he’s been doing it for years at Crawford and Reddam House Schools – but this time it’s his own project. He explained that he has skin in the game. That means he is even more passionate and determined to make it work. He is even going to teach history next year to make sure it’s working properly from the teachers’ perspectives.

“We have appointed Nkuli Gamede as principal. He has a background in traditional boys’ schooling, but he buys into what we are trying to do completely and couldn’t be more excited about getting started,” Shaun said.

“The building is getting there, the teachers have been appointed and the classes are filling up. I can’t wait for January.”

Neither can I. Schooling needs a shake-up. Covid-19 and Shaun Fuchs have conspired that Centennial School in Sunninghill be the place where we can see what the future might look like. Maybe, in education, we are really experiencing an era-ending event.

These teams stood out

 

Here are 10 teams that stand out from the thousands I have watched over the years

Team achievements

THROUGH the mass of matches and competitions I was witness to over the 30 years I was involved in reporting on school sport there have been a number of performances that have stood out. My fading memory, I suspect, has led to me omitting some achievements that should be included in any list and I’m quite sure there were many others that I never saw. This selection of 10 consists (as is the case with all the lists I’ve compiled in the book) only of things I actually witnessed.

1 King Edward VII School in the Johnny Waite Knockout Tournament.

The Johnny Waite Knockout is the limited overs tournament contested by the schools in the Central Gauteng Lions union. It began as a 35 overs a side competition in 1974. A B section was introduced in 1981, and a C section (now for under-16 teams), in 2004. The format has been changed to T20 and the A section now doubles up as the provincial eliminator for the national Schools T20 Challenge tournament.

King Edward has dominated the competition over the years, winning the A section 20 times in its 45-year history. They have won the B section 14 times and the C section nine times. The 2010/2011 season is the one that I particularly remember. KES won all three sections that year, the first school to do so and the only one since then. They beat St Stithians in all three finals as part of what has become an ongoing fierce rivalry between the two schools.

South African captain Quinton de Kock played in that first team final, as did Keaton Jennings who was to go on to play for England. And I was at that game.

2 Bree Primary School win the Danone Nations Cup World title

In the Covid-19 disruption of 2020 it’s easy to forget that in 2009 the world was also struck by a pandemic – H1N1 (swine flu) and it too disrupted sporting activities. One event that was called off that year was the under-12 Danone Nations Cup World Finals tournament that would have been held in Sᾶo Paulo.

The Danone Nations Cup is an annual event and the 2010 world finals were scheduled to be hosted by South Africa. It was decided to stage two tournaments – 2009 and 2010 – at the same time and they were played at Tukkies in Pretoria, with the final day at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto.

Bree Primary, a small school in Mayfair, Johannesburg, had won the 2009 SA national title and were supposed to go to Brazil, instead they played in the world finals tournament at home in 2010 – and they won it.

The players were members of the Orlando Pirates Youth Academy, based at nearby Arthur Bloch Park and sent to Bree for their schooling. So, they were a selected rather that a bona fide school team, but at that age the boys were still quite green and it took a superb team effort and great coaching to see them come though three pool games, a quarterfinal, a semi and the final unbeaten.

I was at that final and to see the support that those 12 year-olds got from the Soweto home crowd was something I’ll never forget.

3 Jeppe High School for Boys Hockey 2018

I’m not a great fan of the rankings of school rugby teams that are compiled by the school sport websites, mainly because they are (outside of the top five or six) evaluating teams that don’t actually play against each other. That’s not the case with boys hockey where there are tournaments and festivals at different times of the year to which all the top schools are invited and they generally do meet up with each other every year.

So, when the Jeppe 1st hockey team ended the 2018 season ranked number one on all the sites that had published rankings, they had in fact played against all the teams in the top 12 of those lists. I still don’t really agree with the concept of rankings, but Jeppe was undoubtedly the top school in the land that year.

Their results proved that. They played 31 games in all, winning 22 and drawing nine. A number of those draws were in festival games that were of short duration and they would certainly have won some of them if they were the regulation length.

Jeppe won the Aitken Trophy – the Gauteng schools tournament – for the fourth year in a row that year (they won it again in 2019). They also won the local under-16 and under-15 tournaments in 2018.

4 Western Province Youth Rugby

SA Rugby’s demographic engineering of the teams that play in its youth weeks – the under-13 and under-18 Craven Weeks, the under-18 Academy Week and the under-16 Grant Khomo Week – definitely benefits those provinces who best unearth and develop talented players of colour and take advantage of the special talents that those players possess.

There were no youth weeks in 2020, but at the 2019 weeks the regulations required that 12 of the 23 players in each squad had to be black and in addition, the composition of starting lineups, and the numbers on the field at any time were stipulated.

There is a long rugby tradition among black people in the Cape and Western Province has worked hard to use that to its advantage. Its township and rural development programmes, and the recruitment of talented players into its top rugby schools has paid dividends to the extent that WP sides are now chosen entirely on merit, and yet almost always exceed the compulsory quotas. This has led to them winning the main game at the under-18 Craven Week on four recent occasions. They have been in the showpiece fixtures of the other three youth weeks regularly in last few years and have won those games more than any other province.

In 2017 the Golden Lions won the Craven Week main game and, significantly, the black players in their ranks, on bursaries at schools like King Edward and Jeppe, played a major role in their success.

5 King Edward VII Rugby 2017

The 2017 King Edward VII School 1st rugby team didn’t have an unbeaten season. They lost to Monument - I was at that game - and two matches were declared non-contests – the rained off game against Pretoria Affies, and the away game at Maritzburg College which didn’t happen because the KES busses were turned around because a cloud of toxic fumes from a rubbish dump fire had descended on Pietermaritzburg.

There have been four unbeaten 1st XV seasons at KES: 1968, 1973, 1974 and 1978. The 2017 team don’t make that list, but few would dispute that it was among the very best produced by the school. Those unbeaten teams played fewer games, generally and their fixture lists included matches against Joburg schools mainly, many of whom no longer play rugby. The class of 2017 had to take on schools like Wynberg Boys’ High, Rondebosch, Waterkloof, Affies, Monument, Bishops and Hoërskool Bellville.

They beat all of those, except for Monument, who beat them 24-19 in a game that the Reds dominated everywhere except on the scoreboard. KES were up at half time against Affies and, I thought, in with a pretty good chance of recording their first win over them, when that game was called off under the lightning safety protocols. KES won the first leg of their double header against Maritzbug College, at home, quite comfortably and although it might have been trickier away from home in the second. It’s unlikely that they would have allowed themselves to lose the last game of that great season.

In the end, their record read 14 wins and one loss, with those two undecided games. But it was also the style of those victories that made me, among many other neutral schoolboy rugby fans, try to be there every time they played. There was plenty of flair and adventure, flowing from disciplined ferocity up front.

It was a team performance for the connoisseurs, and the individual players got their rewards too. Seven of them made the Golden Lions Craven Week team and a further 10 were in one of the two Academy Week teams that the Lions fielded that year. Four were selected for SA Schools: Keegan Glade, Yanga Hlalu, Kennedy Mpeku and Travis Gordon. Gordon captained both the Lions and SA Schools teams.

6 St Stithians T20 Cricket

In 2012 Cricket South Africa introduced a national T2O competition - the Schools T20 Challenge, sponsored in the beginning by Coca-Cola. Knockout competitions are played in all the affiliated provinces, with the winners playing off in their franchises to get to six schools who play at a national finals weekend.

In 2019 St Stithians College, representing the Lions franchise, became the first team to win the national title four times when they beat the Dolphins representatives, St Charles College, at Tukkies in Pretoria. They had previously taken the title in 2014, 2016 and 2017.

Saints emerged as a major force in cricket in Joburg under the leadership of director of Cricket Wim Jansen who has a philosophy that the key is to play as many matches as possible. In addition to their traditional fixtures against the other boys schools, they play games just about every day of the week, against whatever quality opposition that can be lined up. In the run up to the T20 Challenge, many of those are 20-over encounters and the extra experience has served them well.

There is good coaching as well, of course, including the services of Yorkshireman Peter Stringer, one of the few old-style English cricket professionals still working at a school in South Africa.

Saints were back at the national Schools T20 Challenge finals in early 2020 – one of the few big events that was played before the Covid-19 pandemic closed down sport – but they didn’t make it into the main game.

CSA has since announced that they are abandoning the franchise system, so the format of this competition will have to change in the future, but you can bet on St Stithians being a major factor in whatever the new arrangement might be.

7 Golden Lion Craven Week 2017

The Golden Lions Craven Week team of 2017 was something special. It won the unofficial title, beating KwaZulu-Natal 45-18 main game at St Stithians that year, to become the first Lions team to do so since 2005. Lions teams had made the main game five times in the 12 years in between, but lost every time.

Western Province had come to the week as favourites, but they were held to a draw by the hosts on the opening day which effectively ruled them out of the running because the fixtures committee will always go for the home province to play in the main game when there is nothing to choose between them and another team.

The success of the Golden Lions team, as is always the case at Craven Week these days, was largely based on the quality of the players of colour in its ranks. Many of the stars in the excellent King Edward side that year were black, and they were there, as were, as were a few from Parktown, Jeppe and St Stithians. That the Lions were able to meet the compulsory demographic requirements without having to resort to “quota” selections definitely gave them an edge. 

That Lions team was full of stars. No fewer than nine of them made the SA Schools team and most of those also went on the play for the national under-20 team. Their captain, Travis Gordon, captained the SA Schools team and the under-20s and he, along with several of the others, has played senior provincial rugby since.

8 St Alban’s Rowing 2015

Rowing at St Alban’s College is an ongoing success story. The team is small and a decision was taken to keep it that way, only entering a limited number of races at regattas and at the SA Championships. Their boats are all set up for sculls – two oars per rower – so they only enter half of the races at each event. They usually win them, and are regularly the top sculling club at the Gauteng and SA School Champs.

The one occasion on which they do participate in a 1st eight race, which is a sweep oar event, is at the annual Schools Boat race on the Kowie River at Port Alfred. They borrow a boat, get a crew of eight together out of their top scullers for a few practice sessions, and take on the top schools in the country.

In 2015, in a boat loaned from the University of Pretoria, they actually won the boat race. It’s a head regatta, which means crews race off head-to-head and the last two standing meet in the final. So it wasn’t a fluke that they came out on top, rather a reflection of their superb fitness levels and natural ability over two days of racing.

There are those who say that the only way that St Benedict’s 26-year winning streak at the SA Schools Championships can be broken would be for St Alban’s to increase their numbers and enter the single oar races as well. They insist that they have no interest in doing that, but if they did, their proximity to the best training facilities at Roodeplaat dam, along with the rowing talent that they attract, might just do it.

9 St John’s Rugby 2019

It was impossible not to enjoy watching the 2019 St John’s College rugby team play.

They came within a whisker of being unbeaten against Joburg opposition – they lost to Jeppe by a single point early in the season and drew with King Edward and were comfortably the better side in both those games.

They also lost to St Andrew’s College and to Kingswood at the Grey High Festival, but they won all their other games, and that included wins over fierce local rivals St Stithians, and over St David’s, St Alban’s and St Andrew’s School. They were also victorious over Michaelhouse in that annual fixture.

More important than the results of the games, though, was the manner in which they played them. In an era when the majority of schools are adopting a more conservative style, turning school matches – especially those against traditional rivals – into mini Test matches, St John’s played with a spirit of adventure and abandon that made them a joy to watch.

I watched them play as often as I could that year and was never disappointed. Of course, they had the personnel to play that way. They had speedy wingers who were excellent finishers, skillful centres, a flyhalf with and educated boot and forwards who were able to win them enough ball to play with.

The main thing was that coaches Gerrie Visser and Peter Murison allowed the players to express themselves and adapted their game plan to their abilities. The result was a breath of fresh air in a season characterised by stolid, subdue and penetrate rugby.

10 Wits Varsity Cup 2020

University rugby doesn’t really belong in a collection of school sport memories, I know, but so many of the players involved in the Varsity Cup are ones that I saw at school level and, besides, I’ve never denied being a fan of the Varsity Cup competition, and of Wits in particular, and what they achieved in 2020, before the season was brought to a halt by the Covid lockdown, was just so remarkable.

I’ve been watching Wits play for years. I saw them relegated from the Pirates Grand Challenge, the local 1st league, I saw the club coming close to closing down, I watched them regain 1st league status and, in 2019 saw them win the Pirates Grand Challenge title - the Golden Lions club league - under coach Hugo van As.

That form carried on into the Varsity Cup of 2020. When the competition was stopped they had played five games, won four and drew one. They had beaten UCT, UJ, Pukke and Tukkies and were lying third in the league with three games to go. They would have had to face Shimlas and Maties still, but the way they were going they were a shoo-in for the knockout stages of the tournament.

Wits was excluded from the first Varsity Cup lineup in 2008 and were included in 2011 when the league was enlarged. They never won a game in 2012 and 2013 and were relegated to the B Section Varsity Shield in 2014. In 2016 they won the Shield and they were back in the Cup competition in 2017.

The academic entry requirements at Wits are more stringent than those of some at the other institutions. They don’t offer short, low intensity diplomas that rugby players can enrol for. All their bursary recipients have to meet the entry criteria for degree courses, and they have to pass to keep on playing.

With that in mind, and considering the state that rugby at Wits was in a few years ago, the Wits 2020 Varsity Cup campaign certainly makes my top team performances list.

 

Why were our water polo teams so badly beaten at the Olympics?

 

I could write a book on this. Many of our top ex-players have commented on the poor performance of our water polo teams at the Tokyo Olympics and most of them are part of the story I’d tell. I was just an outsider looking in. I did that for 30 years, though, and the story hasn’t really changed in all that time.

In fact, the reason why I can come up with a lengthy rant like this on a Saturday morning is that it’s not an original story. There are parts of what I’ve written below that I lifted verbatim from an article I wrote 15 years ago after the SA team was thumped at the World Championships.

The bottom line is that water polo in this country is its own worst enemy. I’ve told polo people down the years that your downfall is that you eat your own young. That’s harsh, but certainly it’s true to say that there are only a handful of you spread across the land, yet you are incapable of getting along with each other.

Provincialism is rampant, but that applies to other sports too. The problem with water polo, in my view, is that too many nasty, toxic narcissists have served in senior positions (and in positions lower down) over the years. They seem to hang around for ever, and rise through the ranks, and no-one is capable of getting rid of them. In fact, like in politics, it seems that being an A-hole is a pre-requisite for certain jobs.

The result has been that decisions are made for the wrong reasons, capable people (many of whom are not too kosher themselves anyway) are left out of management or fired from coaching positions. Our best players aren’t chosen for teams – too often they don’t make themselves available for selection - and transformation hasn’t been managed as successfully as it has been in other codes that face the same problems.

Then there’s a dysfunctional mother body that seems to be anti-water polo and has down the years tried its best to hobble one of its own divisions through interference, poorly conceived transformation strategies and non-funding. In fact, the national swimming body sees water polo as a potential source of income for itself, rather than as something it should be investing in.

There’s no money of course, because they messed up their last sponsorship so badly and the former sponsors poisoned the well so effectively that no sponsor will touch them, despite the fact that swimming has been our most successful code at the Olympics (and is again this year, so far).

So, to get back to the question, why do our teams, with so many talented players in them, get beaten so badly? Well, obviously we are overmatched. We are up against fulltime professional players who have been participating in top leagues and international competitions for four years since the last Olympic Games. Our players got into the water as a team for the first time after they arrived in Tokyo. They had to pay for their preparations themselves, while their opponents have been given all the necessities and luxuries needed to succeed at this level.

We never had a chance, but there were moments in games when both the men and women showed what could be. The top players in the world were dispossessed on occasion and there were times when the opponents had to use all their skill and experience on defence to keep us out, and we still got some of them excluded, and scored one or two great goals.

One of our most experienced administrators compared watching the games to a documentary on clubbing baby seals, and then he had a go at the provincial affiliation of the coaching staff. Well, I watched every match and from time to time our little seals turned on their attackers and snarled at them, making them take a careful step back. That’s what we expected of them and, for me, it made it worth getting up in the middle of the night for.

The wisdom of going the Olympics in the first place has been questioned. I agree that we should rather be playing in second tier competitions where we are more competitive, and we’ve done quite well in some of those over the years. I remember reading at the time of our readmittance that, for water polo to continue as an Olympic sport, there has to be a representative from all five continents, including Africa there. That’s what the five interlocking rings mean. The Olympic Charter requires that the game be played on four of the five continents, but in the spirit of things, the continental champions of all five are invited. So there’s always a slot for us (or Egypt) and I guess we have to be there or there’s no chance of us ever improving.

But we really do have to do things better. The solution is actually quite easy, on paper. Create a development system that builds on the undeniable talent that we have in our schools (and include transformation in it), institute a better competition structure, get rid of the A-holes and appoint good administrators. Then choose the best players and the best coaches and support them financially.

I know that’s probably never going to happen, not all of it, but we could make a start by simply learning to get on with each other. And, for Pete’s sake, stop eating your young!

Some pretty sports fields, and some not so pretty

Here are some more memories. I was hesitant about the second part - I don't want to be cruel to anyone, or to diminish the hard work that's done at those venues. They are places that stick out in memories, though, and this exercise is all about remembering.

 

The good and bad of places to play

IN MY 30 years of covering school sport I’ve been to just about every school and sports club, in Joburg certainly, and also in most other parts of the country. Sports fields get, in our drought afflicted country, an inordinate share of the scarce water resources and they often stand out as emerald jewels in semi-desert surroundings. They are the favourite children of groundsmen and curators, and are lovingly cared for.

I’ve come across some spectacular venues on my travels and some that, for whatever reasons, are not quite as nice.

I decided, seeing as I’m in the business here of compiling lists, to include 10 great venues that I have been to, and 10 that are not as good. It’s a subjective exercise, based only on places I personally visited. We all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and my evaluation is skin deep – it doesn’t consider any of the emotional attachments, the personal history of triumph and disaster, and the sweat deposited by those who trained and played on those fields.

So, expecting to catch flak, here are my 10 nicest school sports grounds, and 10 that are not so great.

The good

I’ve done this exercise before – I listed my 10 most beautiful schools rugby fields in a column, and the 10 nicest cricket fields I’d been to in another, and of course there were objections to them, as there will be to this combined list of the nicest places to watch school cricket or rugby.

1 Camps Bay High School

Coastal schools obviously have the advantage when it comes to beautiful backdrops to their sportsfields. The mountains and the sea make for spectacular settings and when you have both, it’s an unbeatable combination.

Camps Bay has that. We went on rugby tour there when I was at Highland North and I remember marvelling at it even then, when I was young and winning the game was the biggest thing in my life. Stand behind the posts on the Eastern side and you have Lions Head and the Twelve Apostles soaring above you; from the other end it looks like the ground behind the dead ball line drops off directly into the Atlantic Ocean.

We won the game that day, I think, but it’s that view that I will always remember.

2 Burger Field St John’s College.

It’s always about the backdrop when it comes to beautiful sports fields and, although there are no mountains, and no sea, the main rugby field at St John’s, carved out of the side of Houghton Ridge, has a glorious one.

It’s the back end of the Herbert Baker designed school building. Go around to the other side and you’ll see that the College was designed to look like one of the old public schools of England. From the rugby field side, it’s a soaring structure, built out of the same quartzite that the ridge is made of.

You won’t find a better man-made backdrop to a sports field anywhere in the country.

3 Bridge House Franschoek

No part of Franschoek, nestled in the Berg River valley below the Drakenstein and Franschoek mountains, is not beautiful. So, obviously any cricket ground located in the area is bound to be spectacular – and the field at Bridge House School is certainly that.

The school was only established in 1995, so I never knew about it until some games at the 2018 Khaya Majola Week were played there and I got to see it. The school is built on a corner of Graham Beck’s Bellingham wine estate and because it’s new, the trees planted around the field still have to grow into big providers of shade, but the outfield’s a carpet and the wicket, they told me, is excellent.

Architecturally, the school buildings next to the field have touch of Cape Dutch about them and behind them the mountains soar into the heavens. It’s quite a sight.

4 Pollock Oval Grey High School

There’s a bench next to the main cricket field at Grey High School in Port Elizabeth marking the fact that the field has been named the Pollock Oval, in honour of the school’s greatest sporting alumnus and South Africa’s greatest cricketer, Graeme Pollock. His achievements have been engraved on it, reminding current cricketers at the school just how great he was and, undoubtedly, inspiring them.`

And it’s quite a field. It is surrounded by massive old trees that cast a deep shade, overlooked by the main school building with its soaring clock tower. In one corner is the old pavilion, almost 100 years old, next to the new one – an artful blend of the old English cricket pavilion and Cape Dutch architectural styles.

Grey has produced the most SA Schools cricketers of any school in the land. Playing and practicing on a field like that must certainly have something to do with that.

5 De Villiers Oval SACS

Age has a lot to do with the beauty of sports fields. It’s difficult to make a newly constructed facility look great. SACS is the oldest school in the land and it has been on its current site, the Montabello Estate in Newlands below Devil’s Peak, since 1959.

That air of age and tradition, when combined with a spectacular setting, the mountain in the background and rain forest-like kloof vegetation just beyond the boundary – if it’s raining anywhere in Cape Town, it’s raining in Newlands, they say – makes the cricket field at SACS one of the most beautiful I have seen, even during the drought that the city was experiencing the last time I was there.

6 Brug Street Paarl

It’s the mountains, again, that make Paarl Boys’ High’s rugby field special. In this case the Du Toitskloof mountains loom beyond the touch line on one side of the field and Paarlberg on the other. When you sit in the stands, in front of you are the Berg river and the ‘onder-dorp’ beyond that, and behind you, the ‘bo-dorp’, the vineyards, Paarlberg, and the Taal Monument.

There’s a tangible sense of conflicted history about the town of Paarl which ties in somehow to one of the big curiosities of school rugby – Paarl is in the heart of the Boland, yet the rugby players at its schools play for Western Province at the Craven Week.

The Hoerjongenskool Paarl – Paarl Boys’ High or Booishaai - is part of SA school rugby’s elite. They are seldom outside the top three in the land. Their big derby against neighbours Paarl Gimnasium is played at the town’s Faure Street Stadium. Brug Street could never accommodate the crowds that turn up for that game. But it’s there that those boys learn to play the game – it left a deep impression on me.

7 The Mark Stevens Aquatic Centre, King Edward VII School

I’m getting ahead of myself with this one I know. The indoor pool at KES was only completed during the lockdown, and I haven’t seen a race swum, or a polo ball thrown in anger in it yet, but it’s the most exciting school sports development in Joburg in years.

I went to look at it a few times during the construction process and I went to take a look after it was finished and filled with water. It’s going to be something special.

The problem with Joburg’s temperate climate is that our summers are actually quite short. It’s too cold, really to train outdoors before late October, and by March the water’s getting cool again. So an indoor pool is important if you want to take water sports seriously. KES has one now and I predict they will soon return to their former glory as top dogs in the pool.

Facilities like that aren’t cheap and it’s incredible that there’s an old boy who was generous enough to foot the bill for its construction.

The annual King Edward Water Polo Tournament is the most prestigious in the country, when it’s next staged it will be in the best school pool in the land.

8 St Stithians Wayne Joubert Field

Sports fields in Joburg are not well known for spectacular views, the Wayne Joubert field in the uppermost part of the sprawling St Stithians Campus is an exception.

It’s not one of the school’s main fields – It’s a bit remote from the rest of the campus and it’s quite a steep walk to get there, but it does have floodlights, courtesy of Fifa, who used it as one of the training grounds for the 2010 World Cup. So it’s a venue for night matches – rugby and cricket, and the Saints soccer section is based up there.

The Higher Ground, a popular independently-run restaurant and watering hole, overlooks the field and there are few better places to watch sport than from its verandah, with a refreshment in your hand. You look down on the field and the school campus, across the Braamfontein spruit valley and up at the ultra modern urban landscape of the Sandton CBD.

That part of Joburg certainly isn’t flat and featureless and the Wayne Joubert field is a good place to observe it from.

9 TC Mitchell Oval St Alban’s College

St Alban’s College is located in a scenic part of Pretoria. It’s leafy and hilly, with lots of open space by way of nature reserves, parks and bird sanctuaries. The school is located between two of those - the Strubens Dam bird sanctuary and the Faerie Glen nature reserve.

The cricket field is on the nature reserve side and it is overlooked by a koppie and surrounded by trees with a spruit running along just beyond the boundary on the Eastern side. It’s an immaculately tended playing area. The pavilion has a breezy viewing deck, a great place to watch the action from on a typical hot Pretoria summers day.

The other fields at St Alban’s are similarly pleasant. The annual Independent Schools Festival is permanently staged at the school. You can see why.

10 Meadows, Michaelhouse

When I went to the Khaya Majola Week at Michaelhouse in 2018 it was the first time I had been to the school. It’s a magnificent place – red brick buildings dotted around a forested parkland and immaculate sportsfields all over the place.

The cricket week was head quartered in the Red and White – the clubhouse at the main cricket field and it’s a beautiful setting. The best of the fields, I thought, however was Meadows, the main rugby field, where there were also Khaya Majola Week matches played that week. 

Without it’s posts and markings, it was difficult to see exactly where the rugby fields lay in that extensive meadow. The edge of the vast lawn merged into the forest on the one end. On the day I was watching cricket there a Midlands misty drizzle descended, driving the players off the field. It was magical, one of the most beautiful of all the many beautiful places that my sports reporting travels have taken me to.

 

 

The not so good

1 Gelvandale Cricket Club

There are some other contenders, but the honour of the ugliest of all sports fields I’ve been at goes to the Gelvandale Cricket Club in Port Elizabeth. I was there at the 2008 Coke Week when the Gauteng under-19 side played against KwaZulu-Natal.

Gelvandale occupies an illustrious spot in cricket history in this country. Many cricketing greats from the apartheid days played there, and honour and glory goes to those who are keeping the game alive in the township. But I wondered why the boys from KES and St John’s, DHS and Kearsney have to spend one fifth of what was the highlight week of their cricketing lives so far, there.

To be kind, the ground slopes at about 10 degrees, north to south, and has doesn’t have much of what most people would call grass. It is flanked on one side by an electricity distribution station and the southern boundary is the fence of the local cemetery – one wag among the spectators wondered out loud which was worse, Eskom or the graveyard - they both had the stench of death about them.

Then there was the real stench, wafting in from a local sewage works and driving everyone into their cars with the windows up, in the heat and humidity.

2 Distell, Stellenbosch

There have been some other awful settings, often in places where you expect better. I remember the Khaya Majola Week in Stellenbosch where, instead of playing in a lovely setting among the vines and under the mountains, the players were expected to be inspired on a ground belonging to one of the liquor manufacturers, surrounded by railway carriages and empty packing crates, all underlain by that smell of stale booze that you get in a pub at opening time.

Most of the games that week were played at Stellenbosch University where the fields and setting were sublime, so Distell was only unattractive by comparison, I concede. And the wicket, I was told, was very good – Boland senior cricket was based there at one stage.

3. Witrand, Potchefstroom

At interprovincial weeks in Potchefstroom there are inevitably matches staged at Witrand, a local mental hospital. The situation there is similar to Distell – the field is in great condition and the wicket is so good that there have been first class games played there in the past. Aesthetically, however, it pales in comparison to the settings at the NW University’s Fanie du Toit Complex with its Senwes Stadium where the bulk of the games at the Khaya Majola Week I attended were played.

Knowing what the buildings surrounding the Witrand field are used for is a bit intimidating, and the odd inmate would press his face up against the fence from time to time, which is disconcerting, to say the least.

4 HTS Langlaagte

When I was teaching at Highland North Boys’ High School we played rugby in the, then, Administrator’s Cup league competition. You had no say over who you played against and we ended up going to places where we would never have ventured if we had a choice.

One of those was Langlaagte. The school was in the middle of an industrial area, the rugby field didn’t have much grass and it was located between the railway tracks and the mine dumps, which wasn’t great when the wind came up in the second half of the game we played there. Then there were the opposition players, most of them were from a neighbouring orphanage. In my mind’s eye all 15 were identical – around 5’11’’ tall, scrawny, crew-cut, covered in scabs and hard as nails. My memory might be exaggerating the situation, but it was certainly intimidating.

The 1^st team game ended in a 0-0 draw, which sums it all up perfectly.

5 Willowmoore Park

The HQ of Easterns cricket falls into both the good and the bad categories. The stadium used to have those industrial revolution era concrete light pylons, which have since been removed. The main stadium is a bit barren and it’s Northern end abuts on the sleazier side of Benoni’s CBD.

The B field is similarly bleak, but go down to the C and D fields and you are transported into a charming rural setting: fields ringed by blue gums, and bordered by a vlei lined with the willow trees that the complex gets its name from.

It’s as pleasant a setting to watch cricket in as any I’ve been to.

6 Benny’s Care Sports Academy

I speak about the remarkable achievements of this little school in deep rural Limpopo elsewhere and their achievements are all the more noteworthy when you see the field they practice and play on.

I went there with the sponsors one year before their under-12s left for the Danone Nations Cup world finals and I was taken aback to see that they didn’t actually have a field. There was an area of cleared veld with markings on it which over-use had rendered completely grassless.

We watched the coach take his team though a practice session on it which included some elaborate drills that he had learnt when he was sent on a Fifa Coaching course. All part of the Benny’s magic.

7 The Alex Cricket Stadium

At a time when Cricket South Africa was still putting money into their development programme, they built a field in Alexandra Township, Northwest of Johannesburg. I went there on a press junket soon after it was completed and it was pretty impressive, well grassed, with a freshly laid wicket and newly built changerooms.

The problem of course is the location of the field. It’s on Alex’s notorious West Bank, so, it’s prone to flooding and surrounded by the dwellings of some of the poorest of the poor. It’s not an easy place to get to and, once there, the environment simply doesn’t allow for the quiet, relaxed atmosphere that is so much part of the summer game.

There were matches played there during the 2017 Khaya Majola Week and the facility was starting to show signs of wear. By 2020, I believe, it had fallen into disrepair and is being neglected. 

8 UJ Rugby Stadium

The UJ stadium in Melville has improved with age. It was a soulless concrete bowl when it was first built, designed - I’m guessing - by the same architects who constructed the then RAU campus across the road to resemble a giant laager. Now that the trees that were planted then have grown and the bright grey concrete has weathered a bit, the edges have been softened and the place is a lot more pleasant.

It’s still a horribly designed stadium, though. There’s a Tartan athletics track around the field, which puts it pretty far away from the spectators, and the massive grandstand rises 100m above the level of the field. If you are sitting in the good seats outside the clubhouse at the top of the stand you definitely need binoculars to see what’s going on down on the grass.

My abiding memory of the place is, however, being very cold there. In the years that I was a Transvaal schools selector we always held Craven Week trials there, the field is down below ground level, surrounded by water and when the sun goes down on a winter evening, it’s freezing!

9 Meulsloot, Paul Roos Gimnasium

I’ve included Meulsloot, a mud patch at Paul Roos Gim where the Golden Lions beat the Griffons 47-29 on the final day of the 2015 Craven Week, but it was the circumstances, rather than the field itself that made it a horrible place to play that day.

The Craven Week is all about the final day’s fixtures. The top two sides play the last game on the A field, the teams ranked third and fourth the second last game, the fifth and sixth ranked the one before that, and so on. Once the A field schedule is full, the matches are shifted onto the B and C fields at the venue.

The 2015 weeks saw lots of rain, so only two games were played on the main field on the last day, to preserve it for the televised main game. The Lions might have got an early A field fixture if it were not for that, but the record shows that they lost their first two games in 2015 and were relegated to the B field on the final day. No matter where the week might be, when that happens the ground you are dispatched to will be remembered as an awful one.

10 Pretoria Boy’s High Hockey Field

The Pretoria Boys’ High School campus is the most spectacular I’ve ever been to. The buildings and grounds are sprawled across a hillside, surrounded by forests, with ponds and wetlands dotted around it.

To call anything about it ugly would be ridiculous, but I’m including the hockey astroturf, with the athletics track around it, as one of the less than superb fields I’ve been to, simply because it’s weird watching sport there.

Whenever there’s a track around a field the spectators are removed from the action and that applies here. The astro has also been placed in the middle of what was an existing field, so the stands and embankments are some distance away. I found it difficult to feel any excitement watching hockey from there, and in my newspaper days, impossible to take action photographs.

It’s even stranger in athletics season. There are structures on the sidelines of the hockey field and when the middle and long distance races are on, the runners disappear behind them and appear again a while later, much like the horses in the Durban July who are out of sight for a period when they go behind the drill hall in the center of the Greyville race course.

The remoteness of their spectators doesn’t seem to bother the Boys’ High hockey players much, though, their first team is consistently among the best in the land.

 

Some of the special people who have kept school sport going

 The first excerpt from my book posted here got quite a response. So, here’s another one. It’s my recollection of some of the adults involved in school sport that I’ve come across down the years. Wherever you find a successful programme you will find teachers, parents, coaches and administrators who are prepared to make incredible sacrifices. The give, give and carry on giving. There are way more of them than the 10 I list below, I know. By their nature, I guess some of them may be embarrassed by what I’ve said about them. They deserve all the praise and glory that comes their way.

 

Some special adults

 

SCHOOL sport wouldn’t exist if it were not for the hundreds of adults who organise it. Men and women, teachers and others, who have been coaching and managing teams, administrating programmes, running competitions, catering, transporting and administering First Aid. And for most of the years that I’ve been involved most of them have been doing it as volunteers, without being paid. 

I could trawl through my memories and pick out individuals at just about every school that I dealt with who have been keeping sport alive and thriving in the places that they are at, many of them over long periods of time. They have become an essential part of the communities that they operate it, and they play a massive role in the way that the children in those communities are being raised.

We owe a massive debt to them. That they are increasingly being replaced by outside experts in the current era of professionalised school sport is a tragedy. The system was healthy when the majority of the men and women who were shaping the way that sport was played at schools were of the type I mention here.

My list could run to dozens, but I’ve committed myself to just 10. So here they are, bearing in mind that I could have drawn up 10 lists like this one. 

1 Michael Brady

There was a time when I tried my hand at water polo refereeing. I had to referee the games at school anyway, so I decided to take it more seriously. I joined the refs association and went to the meetings. I enjoyed the challenge of studying the laws and applying them in pressure situations. I never lasted long, however, because I just didn’t enjoy it. I love the game, but I hated refereeing it. I found that water polo is just such an angry place. 

Water polo people in this country don’t know how to get along with each other. There is infighting and backstabbing aplenty and rabid provincialism and the sport is subject to the control of Swimming South Africa, a pretty dodgy organisation with serious control issues.

The coaches scream like banshees on the side of the pool – in a way that isn’t tolerated in any other game – the parents hurl abuse at the opposition and the referees cop it from all sides and take it out on their whistles. 

Worst of all, for a referee, much of what happens takes place underwater, or behind a wall of white spray, so you are guessing most of the time.

Under all those circumstances, you have to marvel at a referee who has stuck it out for 30 years and who has somehow risen above all that toxicity to be something pretty unique in water polo – someone who everyone involved in the game actually likes and respects.

That’s Mike Brady and he’s done it through the sheer force of his personality, and the sacrifices he makes. He runs a group of referees in Joburg and they are on duty at all of the tournaments that take place. He is a superb organiser, often acting as tournament director as well, and he referees the odd game too, while giving the glory of the big fixtures to one of the youngsters he is bringing along.

More importantly, he does it all with a smile on his face and a friendly word to everyone he encounters. The players, parents, coaches and teachers somehow lose that simmering anger when they encounter him. How different water polo would be if there were more Mike Bradys.

2 Norman McFarland

In all the years that I coached and watched schoolboy rugby I never came across anyone who thought as deeply about the game and was as innovative as Norman McFarland. He coached the King Edward VII School first team in a period when they were very successful and they achieved those results through having superb skills but also through the things that Norman introduced to give them the edge over opponents who were often much bigger than they were.

McFarland, who passed away at the age of 79 in 2019, reinvented the game, and he did it because in those days you had to coach the players that came to your school – no shopping to fill gaps – and he made up for any deficiencies in size and natural ability by out-thinking his opponents.

So, famously, his teams employed three-man scrums and two-man lineouts, negating the size disadvantage that they were at, and they beat teams that were clearly physically superior to them. There is a story, retold at his memorial service, that the International Rugby Board actually changed the laws of the game because of his tactics. I suspect that’s apocryphal, but I was a Union referee those days and I do recall that we would spend a lot of time at our monthly law discussion meetings trying to figure out what was legal and what wasn’t and how to referee his teams.

To those of us who coached the teams who had to play KES in those days Norman came across as quite an abrasive character. Looking back now, I guess we just didn’t like the fact that we never won. Certainly, when I’d meet up with him in later life when he worked at St John’s, and after his retirement, he was always friendly, kind, and interested in the things I’d written – he made me feel special and I was always happy to see him.

Before Norman McFarland, coaching school rugby was pretty rudimentary and non-scientific. He changed all of that and was way ahead of his time. 

3 Morgan Pillay

I have attended the under-19 Khaya Majola Cricket Week (and its predecessor, the Nuffield Week) just about every year since 1989. At the 1994 week, hosted at Kearsney College I met a young teacher from Pietermaritzburg, Morgan Pillay. He was on the local organising committee, tasked with keeping track of the state of play in the various matches being played around the area, so he worked quite closely with the media who were there. It was the beginning of a friendship which has gone on for 36 years now and in that time I watched Morgan grow into the best sports administrator I have ever come across and one of the most valuable people in schools cricket in the country.

He has been the permanent organising secretary of the Khaya Majola since 1996. It’s an honorary position – he doesn’t get paid anything more than expenses for doing it – and he has kept his real job as a mathematics teacher all along. The tournament is just a week long, but organising it is an all-year affair, so it’s amazing that he has found the time to do it for so many years.

He has fine-tuned the running of the week over the years to the extent that it runs like clockwork now. The wheel isn’t re-invented every year. Pillay’s personality and his unique style of leadership – he is incredibly demanding, but makes those demands with so much charm that it’s impossible to say no – is what makes it work.

Morgan’s birthday, December 18th, always falls slap bang in the middle of the week, so he’s never home for it. He says it’s tough being away from home, but then he does get to spend his birthday every year surrounded by great friends and in the service of the youth. That’s Morgan Pillay – an administrator who is in it for the right reasons. Oh that there were more of them in cricket!

4 Dave Pitcairn

Dave Pitcairn was responsible for profoundly changing the schools water polo landscape in South Africa. When he became principal of Reddam House School in Cape Town after successful spells as a teacher and coach at Jeppe High School for Boys and St Stithians, he set about making it the top water polo school in the land. He managed that in a remarkably short time and, in the process, developed a model that has been emulated by other new private schools, to the extent that the balance of power has shifted away from the older traditional schools in most of the provinces.

He also revived Western Province Schools water polo and made them the top province in the land.

I first met Dave as a rugby and water polo coach at Jeppe. He went to work as a sports officer at Wits University for a while and then taught at St Stithians. He grew into a formidable coach in both rugby and polo. We were on the provincial executive committees of both together and I was involved in coaching provincial teams with him on occasion. I remember thinking that I was way out of my depth when it came to his technical knowledge of both sports.

His motivational talks were on completely different level. I found myself wanting to jump into the water myself more than once.

He took all of that to Cape Town and he wasn’t happy with the state of Western Province schools water polo when he got there – they were a distant third behind Natal and Transvaal those days – so he set about transforming the game at that level too. He got his some of his ex Saints players who were studying at UCT and Stellenbosch involved as coaches and, before you knew it, WP were tops – a position they still occupy.

Dave and his wife Dee, also a school principal, later moved to Australia where they both run schools. He has left deep footprints and a lasting legacy. He made a huge impression on anyone he met. Me included. 

5 Brian Webster

I met Brian Webster at Johannesburg Otters Water Polo Club where we played together in the mighty third team. He was teaching at St David’s at the time and I was running Transvaal Schools water polo. We got him on board as a coach, it must have been in the early 80s, and nothing was ever the same again. A razor sharp wit, an unbelievably sarcastic tongue and a complete inability to suffer fools gladly are what I remember, and what I continued to come across, as I drifted in and out of his considerable presence down the years.

He taught at King Edward School for a number of years and in that time they became the top polo school in the land - there’s always heaps of talent among those boys, and his rough and ready style suited the sort of culture you get in that type of boys schools.

From there he went to St Stithians where he was as successful, in a different setting. He re-invented himself as a girls water polo coach at some stage and played a big role in the development of the game into the fastest growing girls sport in schools in the country.

He eventually stepped down from senior coaching and took junior teams at Saints that hardly ever lost. He remained in charge there, though, and together with his wife Bridget, he invented and initially ran the Saints Invitational Tournament that others are getting the credit for these days.

At the same time, he stayed involved at a provincial schools level. He ran Gauteng schools polo and expertly organised the SA Schools Championships when asked to. He also ran Crusaders Water Polo, the senior club based at Saints and in the holidays he organised coaching clinics and took teams on overseas tours.

He has since left Joburg. Bridget got a job a prestigious girls school in Grahamstown and Brian has gone along. He runs the tuckshop there, and coaches some polo. Grahamstown is now getting the Webby treatment. It will never be the same again, poolside, for them.

Brian Webster was a constant, sometimes disruptive, presence wherever school water polo was being played. He has left a lasting presence. 

6 Di Williamson

Di Williamson began teaching at Highlands North Boys’ High School one year after I did. She stayed there for another 16 years after I left and then moved across to Saheti School where, although she has retired, she still coaches the swimmers. 

Di was a gifted science teacher who produced good results in the classroom, but it was a swimming coach that she is best known. She coached at the school, and also had her own squad of swimmers who she coached professionally, a number of whom went on to earn provincial and national colours. Later on she specialised in coaching competition lifesaving and open water swimming and has had much success in those.

When I became involved in swimming administration I came to lean heavily on her support. Her phenomenal work rate, combined with the friendly relationships she had with the swimmers and their parents, made her the ideal team manager and she accompanied me on countless internal provincial tours and two overseas trips with SA Schools teams.

Her scientific background meant that she was able to fathom the intricacies of swimming electronic timing devices in the early days when very few others knew how to operate them, so she became a fixture on the ETD computer at galas, along with everything else she was doing. 

Di Williamson epitomises one of the essential foundations of school sport: the indefatigable, behind the scenes worker without whom things would never happen. There are many of them in schools– most of them women – Di Williamson was the one I was blessed to have as a friend and colleague.  

7 Adi Norris 

In my early days of reporting on school sport I got to know the people who were involved in organising primary school soccer and cricket in Joburg. The remarkable thing was that they were practically the same group. The two committees had different chairman, but they had plenty of members in common – passionate young men who were prepared to sacrifice hours of time so that little boys could play those games.

Fast forward 30 years and, amazingly, quite a few of them are still involved, although retirements are staring to take their toll now. 

One of those is Adi Norris, although he moved into high school sport at St John’s College later, and he is still going strong. He joined the St John’s staff in 1990, at the prep school but later moved across to the College where he has coached the 1st cricket team for years and played a part in the development of many cricketers who have gone on to higher honours including, recently, Devon Conway who is the New Zealand national team. 

He was responsible for the introduction of soccer as a sport in the high school and coaches that, as well as the under-16 rugby team.

He has also become synonymous with the St John’s Easter rugby festival. He has had a hand in much of the organisation of the event for the past 25 years, but his major contribution has been looking after the visitors, coaches and players. The relationships he has built up with the schools over the years have played a major part in ensuring that this festival consistently attracts more of the top-ranked schools in the country than the other two Johannesburg Easter events. Schools don’t accept invitations to events like this, he told me once, coaches do. His philosophy is that if you make the occasion special enough for the coaches, they will ensure that their teams will come back again.

Adi is the modern version of the fabled old school schoolmaster. A bachelor, married to his work, who keeps on contributing year after year. He is one of that rare breed of teacher-coaches who could probably coach any sport he was asked to, and do it successfully. He has made a massive contribution to the unique type of education that a school like St John’s offers. It’s impossible to imagine the place without him.

8 Tutty Faber 

Schools can only dream of having old boys/parents/supporters like Tutty Faber at King Edward VII School 

He matriculated at the school in 1957, having attended King Edward Prep School, and played 1st team rugby and cricket. He qualified as a civil engineer and played rugby for the then Transvaal in 1961 and 1962. In time his sons attended the prep and high schools and Tutty served on the governing bodies of both, eventually as chairman at both schools. He was also the Chairman of the Strenue Trust. 

It’s more than 35 years now since his sons have left the school, but his association has continued. He began coaching the under-14 (previously under-13) rugby team in 1982 and continues to do so. He has also coached the shotput athletes for all those years. In recognition of his service the South rugby field at KES - where the under-14s practice and play - was renamed the Tutty Faber field in 2007. He is a generous benefactor to the Prep and High schools, supporting building projects and funding scholarships.

My first contact with him was through rugby – my under-13 teams played his and I can’t recall ever winning any of those games. I remember him entering into a lengthy and complicated discussion of the laws of the game at a referees meeting in those early days and he has remained an expert ever since. His teams were coached to play running rugby, underpinned by a firm grasp of the basic skills and superb fitness. It was the foundation on which generations of King Edward 1st teams were built in the years that followed. 

More than anything else, Tutty Faber is a gentleman. You always get the impression that he is pleased to see you, and I never saw him lose his cool. To outsiders like me, he symbolised the consistent striving for excellence that King Edward is known for. Other schools have supporters who are as dedicated and passionate about their schools as he is, he could teach most of them how it can be done with class. 

9 Ernest Botha

When I was part of the group of teachers who decided to establish soccer as an official sport at our schools, we knew we had to speak to someone for advice on how to go about it. There was only one man to call - Ernest Botha. Ernie wasn’t a teacher; he was a professional photographer by trade, but he has been a presence in schools and youth football in Joburg for 50 years. He was a coach, referee and administrator and yes, he told us exactly how to draw up a constitution, how to organise a league and knockout competition and who to affiliate to.

In all the years that I was involved in school sport I don’t think I came across anyone quite as dedicated as he was. He’d be coaching at one school, helping another to get the game started at another, refereeing in every spare moment and serving on the local amateur football association executive, all at the same time.

His was a lifetime love of children and the game. And it is still going on. A few years ago, I went to a rugby match at a school in the South of Joburg and noticed there were primary school soccer games being played on a nearby field. I wandered over, looking to take a few pictures, and found the referee was Ernest. He was well into his sixties by then, and he didn’t stray much outside of the centre circle, but he blew his whistle with authority and the boys were well under control. I chatted to him at the end of the game and he told me he would be reffing all four games to be played that afternoon because the schools involved couldn’t get anyone else – that’s Ernie Botha.

10 Khaya Majola 

The name Khaya Majola has become synonymous with schools cricket ever since the under-19 interprovincial week was named after him in 2001. At the time of his death the year before, he oversaw amateur cricket at Cricket South Africa. Before that, he ran the CSA development programme and those who worked with him say that the increasing interest in cricket from young black boys and girls can largely ascribed to the work he did.

I was fortunate to have known Khaya Majola quite well. His son Vukile, who we knew as Eric, went to Highlands North Boys’ High before the family moved to Boksburg and he was a very good centre in the junior rugby team I coached.

Khaya was at every game we played that year, and many of the practices. He was friendly and generous with his time and advice. After that, I would see him at the Coca-Cola Week each year, and also from time to time at club cricket games in Joburg because, and it’s not widely known, Khaya was also the coach of the Soweto Cricket club.

His role there was very significant, and topical, as the cricket transformation debate rages on. I spoke with him about it on several occasions and he was convinced that the way to keep promising black cricketers involved in the game beyond school was to create opportunities for them to play as a team of their own, in their own environment, not as the odd black player in the predominately white clubs of Northern Joburg.

His death, at just 47, was tragic on so many levels, not the least of being that cricket was robbed of a man who was clearly destined to play a major leadership role in the game later on. Cricket South Africa, I would wager, wouldn’t be in the mess that it’s in these days if Khaya Majola was still around.