The Grant Khomo Week embarrassment

 

I wonder if SA Rugby is a little embarrassed that, on the day when some of the big shots from World Rugby were in town for the U20 Championships, their Strategic Transformation was exposed for what it is – the enforcement of a compulsory racial quota in the teams playing in its youth weeks that is about numbers and skin colours only, that has little to do with really transforming the game.

The fact that is was Western Province that fell foul of the regulations at the Grant Khomo Week and had their U16 team were pulled out of the prestigious “main game” because they did not have the required number players of colour in their match day squad, is the perfect illustration of how absurd it is to claim transformation success on the basis of having more black boys that white ones in junior elite teams.

The Western Cape is a region where rugby, rather than football, is the sport of choice at many rural and township schools. That’s been their strategic advantage ever since these quotas were introduced. Their pool of black players pool is so much bigger, and they can almost always pick their teams on merit without having to consider the quotas. Finding themselves in the situation they did this time was very unusual. If SA Rugby were really concerned with strategic transformation and not just ticking the race boxes on elite team sheets, they would have acknowledged that the Western Cape is one area where they don’t need to worry about demographics and they would have, under the circumstances, let the boys play the game they deserved to be in.

There is no real strategic transformation plan, however. That would involve real development at schools level. It would require duplicating the successes of the Western Cape around the country. Which would require patience, lots of selfless hard work by coaches, fields, facilities and money. It’s easier to just insist on 11 black faces in all the provincial team photos, without doing anything to help make that possible.

And if the provinces don’t obey, they stamp a heavy foot on them and take away the deserved glory from the players in the offending team – black and white.

World Rugby, under ‘Game Participation’ on its website, says the following:

“Rugby has always been described as a game for all shapes and sizes. As the game evolves, World Rugby accepts its responsibility to ensure that, as the pinnacles of the game achieved through elite performance are driven higher, the grass root foundations of the game are broadened and deepened.

“There is a strong symbiotic relationship between the development of the game and performance: without one, the other cannot reach its potential.”

SA Rugby want the elite side of the game to flourish, and they want it to be predominantly black - which is right, given the demographics of the country – but they aren’t doing the necessary development. Instead, they are manipulating selection. I’d be embarrassed, if I were them, that World Rugby was there to see that for themselves.

 

We've forgotten how good the Kiwi players are

 

My sports highlight of the week? …. No schools rugby to go to on Saturday, so I spent the day in front of the TV. It started with the Super Rugby final from New Zealand. I haven’t watched much of that this year, and I’d forgotten how good their players are. Those Northern hemisphere pundits that are saying Ireland or France are a shoo-in for the Word Cup clearly haven’t been watching either – and then there are still the players at the other NZ franchises too.

Next up was the Golden Lions U18s vs the Valke at the Northern Union Bondedag, courtesy of SuperSport Schools streaming. It’s the final Craven Week warmup game and the Lions weren’t great (not until the last 10 minutes). The Valke, full of EG Jansen boys, led for most of the game against a Monument-dominated Lions side, which wasn’t surprising since EG Jansen beat Monument 41-17 a few weeks ago. You have to question how this year’s Monument side can have eight players in the team, and how on Earth Jeppe’s Euxace Kevani wasn’t considered good enough to make it – I know he isn’t an SA citizen and therefore doesn’t count as a ‘quota’ player - but he is the best centre in town, by far, this year and should have been a 1^st choice, on merit. Still, there are some great players in the team, and I’m hoping they do well at the Craven Week.

The commentators during the Currie Cup final described Free State as “everyone’s second favourite team” and that certainly applies to me. I’ve said before that I’ll always watch a Free State team play if I could, starting with Grey College, through the ranks, to this year’s team that won the Currie Cup. Free State has become a farm team for all the other union, that’s a tragedy and it makes their win on Saturday even better.

The Junior Boks battled to beat Georgia in their opening game of the World Rugby U20 Championship and they are disappointed, according to coach Bafana Nhleko, that a good sign, because the Georgians are good, and they are going to shock some teams in this tournament. Still, a win’s a win, and there will be some good games to watch over the next two weeks, taking us to the Grant Khomo Week, and then the Craven Week.

Happy days.

Three highlights as the term draws to a close

 

My sporting highlight of the weekend? ….. Surprisingly, seeing it’s mid-year exams time and there’s not much school sport going on, there are quite a few things to enthuse about.

On Friday – Youth Day – I watched Jeppe play a football match against a St John’s Academy team. I wondered about that at first, surely St John’s aren’t running a football academy at their school? But I learnt it’s not that at all – St John’s runs academic enrichment classes for the top students at the, mainly inner-city, schools that surround them. Mr Mickey Mashego, one of the men who teaches in it, realised that, seeing the boys are at St John’s three afternoons a week and every Saturday, they don’t play sport at their own schools, or anywhere else. So, he started a football programme, and organises games for them, including Friday’s. He refereed the match, and because it was Youth Day, he called the players together before the game and got them to reflect on the sacrifices that were made in the past so that they could get the opportunity to play a game in that magnificent setting.

It was a cold day, but a heart-warming occasion to be at.

It was as cold on Wednesday night when St Benedict’s 1^st hockey team beat St Stithians 2-0, in the last game of the season. Saints have had a great year – they won the Aitken Cup and were about to make history as their school’s first unbeaten team. I confess to having a mean streak – I don’t like unbeaten runs. Maybe its because as a player and a coach I hardly ever broke the 50% win mark, never mind had an unbeaten season. So, while St Stithians were clearly the best side around this year, I was a little bit pleased for Bennies.

Then, thanks to SuperSport Schools, I was able to experience two of the top five schools rugby derbies in the country. Both were thrillers, both won by three points. In a reverse of the first meeting this year between Hilton and Michaelhouse, Michaelhouse weathered an all-out attack on their goal line in the closing minutes to win 18-15; while Kingswood College beat St Andrew’s 13-10 in a tense clash on K-Day – the big Grahamstown derby day.

SupersSport Schools sometime struggles for consistency it its productions. The camerawork and commentary in Grahamstown was brilliant, not so much at Hilton. But, production quality is not their main value, I’m sure, and I know they will get better (it is their first year, after all). If anything, the helter-skelter camerawork, and the over-excited commentators, at Hilton ramped up the drama even more.

K-day was ranked in a poll run by SA Rugby Magazine a few years ago as the 2^nd biggest derby day, behind the Paarl derby. The top five derbies listed in that poll were: 1 Paarl Gimnasium vs Paarl Boys High, 2 Kingswood College vs St Andrew’s College, 3 KES vs Jeppe, 4 Bishops vs Rondebosch, 5 Hilton vs Michaelhouse. I’ve been to three of those in person – Paarl Boys’ vs Paarl Gim; Bishops vs Rondebosch and KES vs Jeppe. Now I’ve experienced the other two, thanks to the wonder of live streaming.

That’s a wrap of interschool sport for now – big interprovincial hockey and rugby up next.

Partners for possibility, a history you can't erase

One of the highlights of my life as a taker of notes and teller of other people’s stories was the six months I spent on the road with Louise van Rhyn, travelling around the country to visit schools and speak to the people who ran them.

An abiding memory will be the closeness of the bonds between the principals and the businessmen and women who were partnering them. A principal stood with her hand on the shoulder of her weeping business partner who was mourning the loss of her mother; a prominent business leader took his principal to the opening of parliament as his ‘plus one’; and a principal, once crippled by shyness was described as ‘presidential’ by his partner – her eyes shining all the while.

And we saw what was possible when good people put their minds to it. The children at a tiny school in the middle of nowhere participate in a mountainbiking programme designed for the poshest of private schools – because the business partner asked the man who runs it to; pregnancy among the teenagers at a township school dropped to zero, while in the streets around it the numbers were out of control; and an army made up of the friends and relations of a business partner who was tragically killed, took over his role and are still working with that school.

We saw things you wouldn’t believe were possible, and they happened because people stood up and partnered with each other.

And everywhere we went people were just so delighted to see Louise. I realised that she was the force behind it all, along with the leaders of the local circles that she somehow inspired to do the impossible too.

That's what it was – Partners for Possibility. It wasn’t a programme concocted in a lab. The lives of  many thousands of children were changed for the better and a thousand schools changed from dysfunctional to functional.

It’s a history that can’t be erased.

The Golden Lions selectors have cast the net a little wider this time

 

My sporting highlight of the week? ….. The Golden Lions rugby teams for the upcoming Youth Weeks were announced and I was delighted to see that the net was spread a little wider this time around.

Last year this time I bemoaned the fact that of the 115 boys named in the five squads of 23, 93 percent came from five schools - Monument (25), Helpmekaar (23), Noordheuwel (20), KES (19) and Jeppe (19). That’s out 40 rugby-playing schools in the province.

There’s still an imbalance in the Craven and Grant Khomo teams, which you’d expect, but in the Welpies (U17 and U16B) teams, the selectors have resisted the temptation to pick the rest of the boys from the top five who were at the trials – like they did last year – and have given some others a look-in.

So, this year 73 percent of the 115 selections are from five schools – Helpmekaar (22), Noordheuwel (19), KES (19), Jeppe (16) and Monument (14). Parktown (1), Linden (1), Allen Glen (1), Dinamika (2), St Stithians (2), St David’s (1), Marais Viloen (6), Northcliff (6) and St John’s (4), all have representatives as well this year.

You can work out from that list, I guess, the schools that some of the selectors are at – I’ve been on those panels and that’s how it works. That’s not accusing them of bias, rather it’s a case of their players having someone to nominate them in the first instance, and then to speak up for them and not meekly allow the big schools to steamroller their way in every position that’s discussed.

The game is in trouble at schools. That number of 40 rugby-playing schools I mentioned earlier used to be over 100 back when I was in the game, and some of them are just clinging on. For schools like that to be able to announce in assembly that they have a provincial player is very important. It may just keep the game alive there for another year. That’s more important that swelling the tally of the big five schools, allowing them to recruit more talented players next year.   

Not that I don’t have a problem with the composition of those top teams. Monument has eight in the Craven Week side. Jeppe, who beat them, has two. In the U16 Grant Khomo team there are eight from Helpmekaar, who have a very good team this year, I hear. But so do KES. They only have three representatives and I can tell you there are many more very good players than that in their team.

 Still, there seems to be a realisation that there are more than just five rugby schools in the region, and that’s a good thing.

 

A good day at the school on the hill

 

 

My sporting highlight of the week? …. I spent Saturday at Pretoria Boys’ High and was, as always, blown away by the beauty of the campus. It was old boys reunion day there and I saw the place referred to as “the school on the hill” several times. It is, and it’s a spectacular hill. The buildings and grounds are sprawled across it, surrounded by forests, with ponds and wetlands dotted around. Parts of that forest have been allowed to remain the way they have always been, which is special, and if you stand down by the Astro you can see the domes and rooftops of the 100 year-old buildings peeking through the woods. It’s magical.

A school is about people more than it is about grounds and buildings, however, and those are special too. I must have been greeted by every boy there and at one stage an entire stand full of spectators stood up as I walked by – you don’t see that every day.

The cherry on top of the cake was running into old friends. I met Paul Anthony back in the early 1980s when we were masters in charge of swimming at our respective schools – we once spent a memorable day together in Cairo, of all places, when we were both in transit on our way back to South Africa on Egypt Air.

It was just a few years later that I met Paul Phipps. He was coach of the Parktown Boys’ 1^st team then. We had a great catchup on Saturday and he told me he is retiring next year after 31 years at Boys’ High!

Great grounds, great buildings, well-mannered boys, good men. I hit the highway back to Joburg at the end of the day feeling uplifted.