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.