It's Easter rugby festival time, and I'm looking forward to things staying the same again

 

Sport, these days, is entertainment and the laws of rugby, in particular, are continuously being tweaked to make the game more appealing to spectators, and to TV audiences.

And schoolboy rugby, I’d argue, is the most entertaining form of the game – the numbers that turn up at school fields around the country every Saturday bear that out. And now you can see most school games on TV too, thanks to SupersportSchools.

There’s usually no room to spare at the big interschool derby games, and there won’t be again this weekend at the Easter Rugby Festivals. There are three in Joburg – at St Stithians, St John’s and King Eward VII School – at a couple of others in other places.

The Standard Bank KES Festival is the youngest of the three Highveld events, and it’s the 20^th staging of it this year (it would have been the 22nd is it were not for Covid). The first Saints Festival was in 1984, and St John’s started theirs in 1996.

They are a long-term success story and while there have been some changes to them down the years, they have remained the same in principle, based in their hearts on educational values.

I dug out one of the earliest programmes from the St Stithians Festival and those values were articulated in it:

“The idea is to invite like-minded schools that share a values-driven ethos and have a healthy attitude to sport. It is a festival of rugby with no overall winner, no tournament team and no man of the match awards. The idea was to match schools who don’t normally meet during the season, and as far as possible, there will be no derby games and no repeat fixtures from year to year.”

That’s still how it is. I’ve been fortunate to spend the weekend at the KES Festival for the last few years, and I’ll be there again this year. I was in the office there this week to pick up accreditation tags and I heard those sorts of things spoken out aloud by the organisers. The values are never deeply buried, despite the intense busyness that’s there in the leadup to the event. It’s exactly the same at St John’s and St Stithians, I’d wager.

What goes on between the lines on the field, Adi Norris, the director of the St John’s Festival once told me, has to remain exactly the same for the players, year after year, and the hype and commerciality that surrounds the event must never be allowed to interfere with that.

That’s exactly right. I know that’s what’s going to happen at KES this year – for the 20^th time – and I’m looking forward to it.

KES have assembled an impressive lineup of schools to mark their anniversary. They will only play two games each this year. That’s a change, but a necessary one in the interests of the safety of the players, given the incredible concentration of fixtures at this time of the year and the number of games they are expected to play in a short period.

The 12 schools that played in the first KES festival in 2002 were: King Edward VII, Jeppe High School for Boys, Parktown Boys’ High School, Queens College, Paarl Gimnasium, Durban High School, Affies, Pretoria Boys High, Rondebosch Boys’ High, SACS, Selborne College, Wynberg Boys’ High.

Of those, KES, Jeppe, Parktown, Queens and Pretoria Boys High are back.

Fixtures

Saturday

8am Hudson Park vs Queens
9.15am Northwood vs Brandwag
10.30am Bishops vs Dale
11.45am Ben Vorster vs Eldoraigne
1pm Pretoria Boys High vs Selborne
2.15pm Queens vs Jeppe
3.30pm KES vs Paarl Boys’ High

 

Monday
8am Ben Vorster vs Queens
9.15am Paarl Boys’ High vs Pretoria Boys High
10.30am Northwood vs Hudson Park
11.45am Eldoraigne vs Selborne
1pm Dale vs Parktown
2.15pm Jeppe vs Brandwag
3.3pm KES vs Bishops

I'm not a fan of the language-use in Chasing the Sun

 

I took some flak in the comments section when I said, last time, that the use of the F-word in the Chasing the Sun documentary was way over the top.

I watched the first episode of the second series last night and if anything, the language is even worse.

I’m an educator at heart, one who believes rugby can play an important role in the school curriculum because of the lessons that can be taught through it.

There are skills and techniques that can be learnt and the players become fit, strong young men, but the lessons learnt are really about values. Just like young people acquire facts and figures, and techniques in their years at school, but what we really want them to learn is to become good people. “Good sons, good fathers, good husbands” is a refrain that comes up at boys-only schools quite often.

And I’ve always thought the right kind values can be taught through rugby. People have different ideas about what those are, but courage, commitment, discipline and reliability are certainly some of them. So are some “softer” issues, the ones that define decent behaviour – sportsmanship, honesty, teamwork, courtesy, gratitude etc. Rugby is a game that develops character, good people get the success they deserve. Terms that have become cliched, perhaps, but those are things we tell ourselves, and the players.

The story of the Springboks and their successive World Cup victories is a fantastic one, and the way Chasing the Sun celebrates how certain players have overcome their dire circumstances is deeply moving. The team has mastered what it takes to be winners at that level.

They are the embodiment of many of the values the game teaches, and Rassie Erasmus is an expert at harnessing all of that in the cause of victory. It’s inspirational and if I were a coach I’d want my players to watch the series, and I’d be looking for quotes and anecdotes to use in my coaching, and teaching.

Excessive repetition of the same profanities is, however in my view, a sign of lazy language use. That’s a lesson that teachers who want to produce good people should be teaching, and using the most foul expressions imaginable, all the time, is surely not helping in instilling the values of decency that we claim the game teaches.

Swear on Rassie and the boys – I’m told it happens in every team and dressing room at that level – I’m close to my dotage now, I know, but I find it offensive and, worse, not the example I’d want school players to follow.

Here comes the flak …..

Under 14 is not too soon to go on tour

I remember a time when schools wouldn’t let their youngest teams – U13 then, U14 now – go away on sports tours. The feeling was that touring was a privilege reserved for the 1^st team, something the others should aspire to.

The little ones, it was believed, should concentrate on learning how to play the game (s) first, and that was best done without exposing them to the pressure of playing games at out of town schools. I agreed with that thinking then – part of me still does – do 12 and 13 year-olds really have to be playing on a national stage before they have got the basics down?

But, those were different days, I concede. Sport at the schools that take it seriously is way better organised now, the level of coaching is on a whole new level and the stakes, at 1^st team level, are higher than they have ever been. Anyone will tell you that the degree of success you achieve at senior level is directly related to the quality of your junior programme.

So, U14s began playing across the country too, on a limited scale at first, increasing year by year until we have what took place at Jeppe this weekend past: U14 basketball and water polo festivals so big that they needed three and four days to complete them, involving just about all of the like-minded schools around the country. It was the 25^th year of the U14 Ken Short Water Polo Festival – with the Covid interruptions; while the U14 Basketball Festival has been going for eight.

I was at Jeppe for all of those four days and I came away realising that we weren’t completely right all those years ago and that festivals like these can be a very effective tool in teaching players just starting out what the games they have chosen are all about, on and off the field.

Probably the most important thing, though, is that the two Jeppe events are festivals, not tournaments. They used to be tournaments, with knockout round and finals, and tournament teams used to be chosen, until the headmasters of the schools who play in them agreed that all of that be stopped and that they be played as festivals in which, while the results of matches should matter to the teams involved, they have no greater significance than that.

I’ve taken some flak in this space for condemning an early-season under-14 polo tournament held at a local school where there was a winner, and for speaking out against the SA Schools tournament where they now go down to U12 level – 11, 12 and 13 year-olds playing fully competitive interprovincial sport! Those are things that have no place in educational sport.

And that’s what it is and has to be – educational. There’s where the benefits of playing in a more non-competitive atmosphere kick in. Basketball and water polo are similar games in a number of ways, one of which is that they have biggish game-day squads, but relatively small numbers of players on the field at any one time. At this level, you are unlikely to have a full squad of players who are on the same level, skills-wise, so the temptation, when the result is vital, will be to keep your best players in the game while the rest of the squad warms the bench. That’s flat out not allowed at the Jeppe festivals, and the coaches buy in to it. How are the weaker players going to improve if they don’t get game time? That’s the educational value of a festival.

Then there are the number of matches played in a short space of time. The players get to try out what the coaches tell them, almost straight away. Not that there aren’t gaps between games. That’s when the boys get to hang out together. I spotted them sitting in the shade of the trees and in the marquees at Jeppe throughout the weekend, talking trash and roughnecking – being boys, in an age when doing that is somehow frowned on. Multiday events like these create those opportunities and it’s there that team spirit is built; friendships are cemented and socialisation lessons are learnt – the things that turn those U14 teams into good 1^st teams in four years’ time.

And I haven’t even mentioned the interaction between the coaches and the massive efforts put in by a horde of officials and volunteers to make the two events run smoothly and finish dead on time despite losing all of Saturday afternoon due to the inevitable Highveld thunderstorm.

So, while I do sometimes miss the innocence of a more amateur time in school sport, I saw enough at Jeppe last weekend to convince me that, the way they went about it, they have got it right and that U14 is not too soon to tour.

A perfect way to end the season

 My sporting highlight of the week? ...... I came across this from one of the Jeppe parents:

Jeppe and St David's 3rd cricket teams met on Saturday. The game's not so deadly serious at those schools, at that level, and this was their last match of the season - and ever, for the matrics who were playing.
Jeppe, batting second, were cruising and need six runs to win, with a bit of a trundler bowling and the facing batsman shaping to knock it out of the park (who wouldn't want to, under the circumstances). Then he was approached by the St David's captain who asked him not to. He intended giving one of the matrics in the team the next over. It would be the last time he bowls for the school, he said.
The next ball was a dolly, but the batsman blocked it. The matric got to bowl his over and Jeppe reached the target soon afterwards, but cricket, and the spirit of sport, won the game. Marvellous!