Three festivals in one, not easy but a real highlight

 My sporting highlight of the weekend just gone by? ……… Well, the World Cup final, obviously, but apart from that, it’s got to be the four days I spent at St David’s covering their three simultaneous sports festivals, basketball, cricket and water polo.

It was the independent schools’ half term break – a custom those schools have of giving everyone a weekend off in the middle of all their frantic activity. And then, in true teacher-style, they fill it with even more frantic activity and make those running it work even harder in their break than during their time on duty.

They do it for the kids, of course, although there’s a marketing spin-off for the school, I guess. There certainly should be. It takes considerable organisational prowess to have all those games played on time, particularly at this time of the year when the weather is always a factor. And there is plenty of hard work going on behind the scenes, I sat in the media office and saw a fair part of it.

The real stars were outside though, the coaches, the referees and the boys.

Randomly, some highlights making the whole thing a highlight, included:

The ongoing Michael Mount basketball success story. The Montessori school made both finals of the Inanda Hoops tournament, their under-15s won it and their under-18s came close. The Dubravka Lunnemann legend continues. She’s an ex-parent who originally hails from Serbia who got the school on the basketball map and although she’s older now and takes a bit of a back seat, she was there with the teams at their games and I watched how the players gave her their absolute attention whenever she had something to say to them.

Putting under-12 water polo players into an international size water polo pool and telling them to swim. It’s a long way from goal to goal in a pool like that, and they are little guys. I just loved watching the effort they put in. They are going to be far better at the game for the experience they got this weekend.

The ongoing innovative thinking of Dave Nosworthy. The St David’s director of cricket has coached the game at very high levels, yet there he was, designing a T10 tournament aimed at giving 10 and 11 year-olds a fun-filled, action-packed weekend. The idea was that they should fall in love with the game and make it their choice as they get older. It was in stark contrast to his other innovation – the two-day festival for U18s, aimed at slowing it down and mastering the art of playing cricket over long periods of time.

The kids who spent the long weekend at St David’s all came away a little better at what they do – that's a real highlight to me.

Innovation is the long and short of it at St David's cricket festivals

 

I was going on the other day about the role of tradition in ongoing excellence in schools, and that it’s OK to sometimes bring in new things. Innovation is the opposite of tradition in a way, and there’s nothing wrong with it, as long as it’s in the service of the educational role of sport as a school activity.

So, while the big Inanda Hoops basketball tournament at St David’s this weekend (and I know there are other schools tournaments around the country too), is far removed from traditional school sport, and a bit weird to my conservative way of thinking, it’s a great innovation because it exposes a couple of hundred boys at a time to all sorts of new opportunities to learn sporting and life lessons.

Then, on day two of the Inanda Hoops, the St David’s prep school cricket festival kicked off. And it’s pretty innovative too. It’s for players who will still be at primary school next year, the teams wear brightly coloured shirts and have been given colourful names along the lines of the IPL teams – St David’s Dynamite, Montrose Meteors, St Stithians Supermen etc. And they are playing 10 overs-a-side matches, three in a day.

It’s all the idea of Dave Nosworthy, director of cricket at St David’s, the same man who turned traditional 1^st team festivals on their head by doing away with the usual variety of formats over four days and saying, we’ll play two two-day games at our four day event instead.

I bumped into him at St David’s on Saturday and asked him about the contrast between their two festivals – the longest format in schools cricket at one, and the shortest at the other.

I liked his reply because his reasons are grounded in educational principles and the development of the boys is at the heart of them. They are about boys at opposite ends of their school cricket lives, he told me. The U19 players at the two-day Fasken tournament are about to enter the senior ranks and they need to learn how to play multi-day games where you can build an innings, bowlers have longer spells and fielders are on their feet all day, he explained.

“This prep schools tournament is at the other end,” he said. “We want these boys to become hooked on the game, if they are going to give up a weekend they must be having fun, so the games are short and sharp, the boundaries are brought in, meaning there a plenty of runs, and they play lots of games each day. And we have introduced local rules that are aimed at full participation for every player.”

The growth of cricket is the aim, he explained, and the game is in trouble at primary schools. “Cricket isn’t being played in the third term very much anymore, with the Grade 7s being prepared for high school sports like rowing. rugby, water polo, basketball etc instead,” Nosworthy said. “We want to remind them that cricket is still a wonderful game.”

It is that, and the boys in action at St David’s this weekend are having a wonderful time, you can see it in their faces.

All sorts of lessons learnt by departing from tradition

 

An adherence to tradition, I’ve found, is one of the things that all the good schools have in common. It’s what links the present with the past and keeps the legacy alive. Current learners are told, forced sometimes, to do things the exact way that they’ve always been done and that’s how the values and expectations are passed along. It’s unlikely that long-term, sustained success can happen in the absence of tradition.

That doesn’t mean, though, that things must never change, or that change is necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve been reminded of that this weekend, attending the three festivals being hosted concurrently at St David’s Marist Inanda. These sorts of events have become a feature of the school. They already host major national tournaments in cricket and football and now, during their half-term break, they run the Inanda Hoops basketball tournament which is fast becoming a major “stayers” competition, and as if the place isn’t hectic enough, there is an under-14 water polo tournament on at the same time, and a primary school T10 cricket tournament too.

 So, why did it get me thinking about the role of tradition? It’s the basketball, mainly. I don’t recall reporting on the sport too much in my days at the Saturday Star, and I only left there in 2016. Yet, now we have a tournament like this one. The scale of it, the level of organisation, and the facilities: it’s being played on four courts, the main one an arena capable of hosting games at the highest level. And it’s all accompanied by loud music, with a DJ getting the crowds hyped up.

It flies in the face of tradition. Not so long ago, many schools were dubious about the game, some even refused to offer it. The TV images of street basketball in the States, with its gangster culture scared them off. Even the professional game, as we see it on TV, has players that cannot be called good role models and practices that are hardly educational.

But, school demographics have changed, a new generation of boys and their parents want to play the game and the schools have had to change. It was confirmed to me that change is not always bad when I observed the teams in action at St David’s. Sport at school has to be an educational activity, no argument, if you cannot justify everything that is happening educationally, then it shouldn’t be happening.

And I saw all sorts of lessons being taught and learnt at the Inanda Hoops, in the midst of all that noise and apparent chaos. Take the mix of schools involved, for instance. The top independent schools were there, but so was a team from Soweto, and the local state schools too. That creates opportunities for boys to mingle with and play against people they usually won’t come into contact with. I watched Hilton College play against the King’s School, Linbro Park, and Jeppe play the Soweto Academy. All of those players went home that night knowing a little more that they did when they arrived in the morning.

Some of the coaches seemed to get a little over excited, and there were some hairstyles that wouldn’t be allowed at some schools, but the behaviour of the players was impressive. The lessons of teamwork, discipline, sportsmanship and all-out effort are being taught under some difficult circumstances, and we all know that’s when the best lessons are learnt.

Sure, it’s noisy, some of the kids dress funny and a 60 minute game can easily last two hours sometimes, but going against tradition and allowing the game in has opened up all sorts of educational possibilities.

And St David’s have compressed all of those into a manic four days, and provided a structure for it all, amazingly, to run with precision. 

It’s been wonderful to see.

 

Proper football development - two types, one field

 

Two of my favourite school sports events took place within a week of each other. The 6^th annual Kensington Community Cup soccer tournament was played last Wednesday, and this week, the U15 Iqhawe rugby week is on.

Nothing strange about that – it’s a calendar thing – but, this time, they both happened on the same field: Collard, the main rugby field at Jeppe High School for Boys. Jeppe organises the Kensington Community Cup, a tournament involving teams from the immediate area around the school; while the Iqhawe Week is an SA Rugby Youth Week, run by the SA Rugby Legends organisation, and this is the second year in a row that Jeppe has hosted the teams, although last year the games were played at the Johannesburg Stadium.

The idea with the Community Cup is to arrange a series of games for the local schools – who hardly ever meet each other - and to include a Jeppe team that never plays against those schools, even though they are all within a 5km radius of each other. Sponsors are found to give the players a good meal and each team goes home with a fancy bag filled with new footballs, as well as a set of training bibs and some cones.

 I wasn’t happy to hear that this year it was played as a tournament, with a final, and that individual prizes were awarded – in the past it was festival, with no points awarded and no individuals singled out. I completely miscalculated what a big deal it all was for those teams and players, and the spectators they brought with them. The winners of the final, Jules High, were over the moon and the losers, Kensington Secondary, were devastated. The boys named as the best players on the day were so excited and their supporters overjoyed. It was something to see.

Sadly, that’s about as good as it gets for those players – unless the best of them gets spotted somehow and gets into the youth academy of one of the professional clubs. There really isn’t much organised sport at those schools and SAFA has never done much in terms of broad-based grassroots development (and then they wonder why other African countries, where the professional game is way behind where ours is, but where there are national development programmes, beat us in continental competitions).

The situation is a bit better with rugby, although the challenges there are greater. There is pressure from all sides to make the game demographically representative – code for less white – at the top levels, and we all know that achieving that is a numbers game: to get more elite black players you need more black players at the grassroots level.

Yet, those masses of potential players are at the same dysfunctional schools that the soccer players are at, and it's way more complex to get rugby going from scratch. The rugby authorities are fortunate in that the organisation of rugby at school level in SA is arguably the best in the world. They have used that in their quest for transformation by encouraging the established schools to bring in talented black players through bursaries and, as a result, there are plenty of black players in the top 1^st teams around the country and many of them go to the SA Rugby Youth Weeks. It means that the compulsory race quotas in those teams are met, but it is increasingly going much further than that, and in most years, the best players at the Craven Week are black.

It’s not entirely honest, those elite black players aren’t coming from any sort of grassroots programme, and the number of township and rural schools playing rugby isn’t increasing, but it’s a model that’s working – the black stars shining for the Springboks at the World Cup this month almost all went to the top rugby schools in the country.

Football isn’t emulating it in any way. It’s simply not true to say that the private and former Model C schools don’t have football programmes, it hasn’t been true for many years. There are high quality, mass participation development systems at many of them, and fiercely competitive, well organised competitions. Last weekend Grey College (SA’s undisputed top rugby school, by the way), held its 18^th Nedbank Soccer tournament. The majority of players in action there were black, as they are at all of the half a dozen or so similar tournaments held during the short, intense schools football season that takes place at this time of the year.

SAFA is simply not interested, they still pretend the game doesn’t exist at those schools and no attempt is being made to make their programmes part of the player development pathway, the way that rugby does.

What I like about the Iqhawe Week is that it is aimed at keeping rugby alive in places where it is in trouble. The SA Rugby Legends Association -all ex-Springboks – runs a programme called Vuka that organises leagues and playing opportunities for boys and girls who are not at established rugby schools. They help out with equipment and coaching too. From there they have a regional competition, and an interprovincial week – the Iqhawe Week. The provinces send U15 teams to it, with the proviso that players from their established schools must not be picked.

The Golden Lions union – where there are many schools with rugby field and posts, at least - decided that their team will come from schools who field four teams or less in inter-school matches. In addition to that, they run a Vuka programme in the townships, with about 29 schools involved. The problem there, according to Tim Goodwin of the Lions Union, is that they don’t play enough quality matches in their season. That’s an area where the established schools can help. I overheard the Jeppe people talking about getting teams from there to fill in the gaps in their fixtures. I won’t be surprised if that were to happen – that sort of thing is in Jeppe’s DNA.

I’m on record that I disapprove of player recruitment. The Iqhawe Week is an exception. From the start, the idea was that some of these players should be taken up by the established schools. I saw scouts from quite a number of established schools at Jeppe this week – you could recognise them by the chequebooks sticking out of their back pockets. While you can’t justify taking a player who is already a star away from a school that has a functioning rugby programme by saying it’s in his best interests; giving a player who shows potential, but is unlikely to realise it where he is, a chance at an established centre of excellence is a different matter. There were, I’m told, 22 players who were granted bursaries by top schools at last year’s week.

And they are choosing a team this year that will play in the U16 Khomo Week next year. The scouts will be watching them too, I’d wager.

Two highlights of the week for me – in the same place