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.