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.