The biggest derby was bigger than ever this year

 

Someone told me at the Jeppe vs KES game on Saturday that he was looking forward to reading my blog on the nature of proper derby games, and how this one met the requirements.

I realised that I’m a bit predictable  – I looked in my laptop folders and I found I’ve written the same thing three times before. Not that the KES Jeppe derby doesn’t fit the bill: near neighbours, longstanding fierce rivalry, massive spectator interest etc.

Instead, I’d like to reflect on the day itself. It was remarkable. That’s got to have been the biggest crowd at this match ever.  It’s an occasion that has always attracted the most spectators at a school game in this part of the country, but this year was at a different level.

There are no ticket sales, and therefore no official numbers, but we did do a pretty careful guestimate two years ago and came to around 7 000. The seating capacity was increased by about 1 200 for this year and there were people on hillsides and far away places craning to see. So, while it was nowhere near the 20 000 that some estimated on social media, I’d put it at between nine and 10 thousand.

And, apart from some unsatisfactory behaviour by a few Jeppe old boys – more on that later – there wasn’t an incident that I heard of. That’s due to the healthy relationship between the schools, and it hasn’t always been that way, but also to an extraordinary amount of thought and planning that went into staging the day. Those temporary stands (brought in at considerable cost) are part of that. There have been meetings going back to last year, culminating in a seven-page long running order for the day.

And all of that so that 40-odd schoolboys can play a 70-minute game. The pressure on them was enormous and the way they handled it was incredible. Anyone who points out an error made by one of them in that cauldron as something significant, is just crazy.

KES won by 10 points in the end, and they were good value for it. Jeppe threw everything at them and they stood firm, and struck back with precision. I’ve seen their victory described as an upset, probably based on Jeppe’s win over Grey College. That victory was an outlier, however. I along with many others I’m sure, knew it was going to be close, with KES probably having the edge. The Reds came into the season with a vital “spine” in place – last year’s SA Schools hooker is still there, as is the 2023 Craven Week eighthman (wasn’t he good on Saturday?) and the flyhalf, and no-one outside of Krugersdorp knows why he didn’t go the the Craven Week last year, is still there, controlling the game with his intelligent (and long) kicking.

Against that, Jeppe had some big and powerful forwards and backs that are full of flair. KES were up to stopping those forward drives, and they weren’t fooled by the trickery in the backs. They did that enough times to end up the winners. It made for a great contest.

As for those pesky old boys. Again, no surprises. Misbehaviour by them is universal, it’s happened at this particular game before, sure, but don’t believe you don’t get some of it at St Patrick’s road too. I generally sit on the dead-ball line by the medical centre there - it’s a good spot to take pictures - and you don’t only get polite applause and shouts of “go school” from the old boys sitting in that corner. Ask anyone who was in that area at the Bishops game over Easter.

I’ve seen some real old boy misbehaviour in my 40 years of going to school rugby matches, and it usually happens at local derbies. I’ve seen running battles that have had to be stopped by the cops, I’ve seen pitch invasions, and after one derby between the English and Afrikaans schools in a small town, the fighting was so bad that there was a snap debate in parliament to discuss it. And we’ve all seen the YouTube clips of players and officials getting assaulted by spectators.

That there was never any fear or possibility that those sorts of things could happen at this game, shows the quality of the schools involved.

The behaviour of some Jeppe old boys was never-the-less unacceptable, no question. It's one of those things that is impossible to control by the host school, however. At least the Jeppe headmaster tried - he didn't turn a blind eye,  I've seen that happen too.

So, while condemning those happenings let's also celebrate the spirit on the day as a whole. And congratulate the players for the way they handled the situation. And applaud the Reds' victory, and look forward to seeing it all  again on the 20th of July.

People are making some good points about school rugby

 

Let’s face it, when you agree with what’s being written, it’s damn fine writing.

With that in mind, there’s been some pretty good stuff being put up recently about the state the state of school rugby.

There was Gregg van Molendorff’s piece about Greg Wilmot likening the professionalisation of school sport to a runaway freight train; then Alan Miles (who doesn’t write nearly as often as he should) spoke about the effects of the pressure being put on schoolboy rugby players; and today I read an excellent piece on what’s wrong with allowing massive winning scores to mount up – on the NextGenXV website.

They are all issues that I’ve been on about for years now. The problem is that they have been getting worse, not better.

Take the matter of teams being allowed to post huge winning margins. The NextGenXV story was about Grey College beating Outeniqua 92-3 last weekend. That was a 1^st team game with players who are prepared like professional athletes. So much of what I’m going to say might not apply to them. My real concern is about uneven contests in the lower age grades, and the damage that they cause.

I had a whine about this one last year after Potch Gimnasium lost 83-3 to Paarl Gimnasium. In that post I mentioned that I had written on the topic in 2017, 2018, 2022 and them, in 2023. It’s 20024 now and here we go again.

Here’s an extract from that 2018 piece. It’s a bit over the top, but I must have been angry:

You’ll remember that last year a team that won 221-0 posed for a picture in front of those numbers on the scoreboard and the photo was posted on the school’s Twitter and Facebook sites, to great acclaim. I commented at the time that it was as sickening as those pictures that you see of so-called hunters posing over the carcasses of slain lions or elephants that had been chained to stakes. I have the same nausea again today, and it’s an appropriate comparison, because rugby players who are willing to turn out for the lower teams in the junior age groups are rapidly becoming an endangered species and we should be doing all we can to conserve them, just like we should be looking after those magnificent wild animals.

 

I shared the NextGenXV piece and I got the expected opposition from some quarters. Those who object to lop-sided matches being called of early, generally have two reasons: they believe it’s wrong to deprive the winning team, who have worked hard, and maybe spent a lot of money to be there, of a full game; or they point out that there are lessons to be learnt in taking a good hiding and that there is no “50-point maximum” rule in life.

 

I’m not going to repeat the points made about the physical, emotional and psychological damage that a 100-point loss can have on a teenager. And, yes, I know that you can’t blame a superior team if their opponents give up. The problem starts with allowing the mismatch in the first place.

 

Instead, I’ll quote myself again:

 

My view is that anything that happens at a school has to be educationally accountable, and there’s nothing educational about allowing scores in rugby matches to reach those numbers. Education is about learning things that help children grow and develop into good adults, and that’s as much about building character, kindness and humility as it is about building strength, acquiring skills and accumulating knowledge.

 

Allowing a team of children to be humiliated, discouraged and possibly injured, during a rugby game, while at the same time allowing the other team to bully them, to gloat, and to assume an air of superiority, is not educationally accountable, and that applies to both teams.

 

As for the point about going to so much trouble and expense for possibly just one half of a rugby game, the educational value goes way beyond the one-hour match situation. There are teaching and learning opportunities at training, on the bus trip, on the side of the field, and if the game is called off early, well there are all sorts of lessons there too.

It’s true that you can’t call off the game if things aren’t going your way in real life. And it is our job as educators (and school rugby coaches are educators first), to prepare young people for that. But is subjecting children to pain and trauma the best way of doing that? Isn’t that a bit like the story of the father who tells his kid to jump – “don’t worry, I’ll catch you” – then lets him fall on his face. Telling him, “that will teach you never to trust anyone!”

There have to be more humane, caring ways to teach the lessons of courage, resilience, handling misfortune etc, than sending the hapless E team out to take 100 points from the Superstar School across town, and then have the winners post a gloating picture on Facebook.

 

School rugby can really become a runaway train, if you let it

 

There’ve been murmurs, as there often are when the pressure and fatigue of an unrelenting school rugby season begin to bite, about how the superb system we appear to have going – the one that’s the envy of the other rugby playing countries – is maybe not as shiny and clean as it should perhaps be. Especially seeing that sport at school is actually not an extra-curricular programme, as it’s often referred to, but in fact it is – and there’s no debate here – firmly at the centre of what should be taught and learnt in schools.

Gregg van Molendorff, deputy headmaster at Graeme College, has written a piece in which he recalls that, five years ago, he warned that the culture in schools regarding winning and losing was leading to undesirable behaviours, on and off the sports fields. Sadly, we are in more trouble five years later than we were back then, he concludes.

He quotes a paper written by Grahamstown sports psychologist, Greg Wilmot - https://wilmotpsychology.co.za/navigating-the-professionalisation-of-school-sport-in-south-africa - , who calls the professionalisation of sport at schools a “runaway freight train” – out of control and gaining speed and momentum all the time as it proceeds.

Between the two of them, Van Molendorff and Wilmot produce a list of all the things going wrong in school sport, ascribing them in the main to a culture which measures the value of a school by the results of its elite sports teams, and the lengths to which schools are prepared to go to keep those teams winning.

The actions of coaches, parents and players in response to the resultant pressures are at the heart of what’s going wrong.

Wilmot points out that there has not been much research into the effects this has on schoolboy players and that many of the stories we hear are just that – unsubstantiated anecdotes. He even quotes me as one of the storytellers. although the column he refers to:

https://www.iol.co.za/sport/opinion/professionalism-in-school-sport-not-always-bad-1990101

is actually more about the greater player safety that a professional approach has brought than about what's going wrong (I did, however, tell a number of horror stories in that regard over the years).

They may not be research-backed, but the abuses that inevitably arise when winning matches is the dominant value ascribed to, are well known. And we have all known about them for some time.

I’ll spare myself the trouble of summarising the lists of the two educationists above and give you mine. It’s the same as theirs, and I know it by heart. The points are chapter headings in my book (and I will publish it one day).

I actually preface that bit by speaking about what I call “The Lance Armstrong Excuse”. I got the idea from the famous Armstrong interview with Oprah Winfrey. In it, he told her that he didn’t believe he was cheating by doping during his seven Tour de France victories because everyone else was doping too. He was justified in breaking the rules, he said, because he wasn’t getting an advantage.

Those sitting in judgement of him didn’t fall for that, neither did most other fair-minded people, I’d hope – including the very educators who now feel they can indulge in the practices below because every one else is. “You’ll never be competitive if you don’t,” is the refrain.

So, they pressure rugby players into specialising at an early age; they subject them to exercise intensity and workloads that have been shown to be inappropriate for their ages; they go out shopping for players to fill gaps in their planning; they turn a blind eye to rapid changes in body size and shape that could not happen without chemical assistance, etc.

And when things go wrong, they blame the players themselves, or their parents, or the body builders in the local gym. They speak of “unforeseen consequences” when they know exactly what could happen.

Runaway freight trains, we see in the movies, are impossible to stop once they get going. You have to remove some of the load back at the start of the journey, then you need good brakes, and a driver who keeps the whole thing under control.

The harm done to young men if you don’t do that, Wilmot points out, is real and lasting. You don’t need research to see that.

Two things that make our schools rugby great

 

I was invited during the week to a briefing to mark the launch of the 2024 SDC Noordvaal Cup tournament. I went along because I saw that Swys de Bruin would be part of a panel discussion and was interested to hear what he had to say and because I knew I’d see some old friends there.

Swys said all the right things about reducing the pressure on schoolboy rugby players and getting them to play for the enjoyment of the game, although I fear he was preaching to the wrong congregation – in my experience this competition, and its forbears, epitomises the importance of winning like nothing else I’ve seen.

The tournament was called, several times, the biggest in South Africa and, possibly the biggest in the world. In my days as a reporter, I learnt never to say things like that. Whenever I did, I would be called out pretty smartly to be told of something else that was older, or bigger, or whatever.

I don’t know what they mean by “biggest”. If its about the highest number of schools, and teams, playing in a single, unified competition over a number of weeks culminating in day in which the finals of all four divisions are played under the same banner, it might well be that there is nothing quite like it anywhere else.

If you are measuring big by the number of matches and players involved, however, I’ve argued in the past that there’s nothing to match a Saturday morning in the non-league, “friendly”, schools rugby season. Take this weekend, and the independent schools are on holiday, remember. There will be 21 rugby matches at Jeppe, where Westville Boys’ High are the visitors; Pretoria Boys’ High are travelling to Maritzburg College with 25 rugby teams; and there will be 27 games at Parktown, where KES are the visitors, over Friday and Saturday.

That Parktown fixture is interesting. KES have way more teams that they do, so Springs’ Boys High are also involved and the sides are matched up so that every KES team gets a game on the day. Last Saturday Rand Park filled in simiarly at Jeppe vs St Stithians, and later in the season Northcliff will help out in Jeppe’s games against St John’s.

That’s 74 games at three venues this weekend. On a full match day in the Noordvaal competition, there will be 17 fixtures and assuming that each school fields eight teams (which definitely won’t happen in the lower divisions) that adds up to 136 games. When the private schools get back, and if you add in the fixtures at the smaller Joburg schools, and at those in Durban, Cape Town and the Eastern Cape, you will see that the numbers don’t compare.

That’s not to say that the Noordvaal Cup is not a great tournament. It provides regular competition to 37 schools and their games are played in conditions that meet professional standards. And there's no doubt that the highly competitive nature of the competition, and the pressure that involves, makes for the development of very good players. Those are the sorts of things that people are talking about when they say our schools rugby system in the best in the world.

And side by side with that, we have this huge mass participation, non-league setup that, by the way, is largely demographically transformed.

I’m excited about this weekend’s Jeppe vs Westville exchange – it will involve over 1000 boys in all sorts of codes and activities – and I can’t wait, too, for April 20 when the Noordvaal Cup kicks off with Helpmekaar vs Monument, a pretty tasty matchup to get things rolling.

40 years later, and the Easter festivals are as good as they have ever been

 

The schools rugby festivals have been part of Easter in this town since 1984. The Saints Festival would have been celebrating its 40th anniversary this year if it weren’t for Covid, St John’s have had their 25^th  birthday and this year is the 20^th KES festival.

Those who came up with the idea in the beginning could never have imagined they would have the longevity they have had and that, all these years later, when the world would be such a different place, we could have a day like Saturday.

I was at King Edwards in the afternoon, and at St John’s earlier and I don’t recall seeing crowds bigger than those. I meant to go to Saints too, but I was worried that I’d never find parking back at KES for the Jeppe game, which I (and half of Joburg, it turned out) wanted to see. I’m told there was a massive crowd there too.

The founders of that original Saints Festival who first had the vison have, sadly, all passed on now. Colin Hall, who was later to become a giant in the South African business world, was the head of the parents association back then, he died earlier this year; Mark Henning the headmaster in 1984, died in 2021; and Tim Clifford, the rugby coach who came up with the concept, passed on a year later.

I’ve been around these festivals for most of the 40 years and seen something of their inner workings. They have become big commercial undertakings, and fund-raising enterprises for the schools that run them. But the educational principles articulated in the beginning are strictly adhered to.

I’ve spent the last few festivals at KES, where they give me a place to sit in the tournament office and I leave at the end of each one newly amazed at the level of commitment and the sheer hard work put in by so many, mainly volunteers to make it all work. I’ve been a spectator to the same activities at the other two festivals, so I know the same things are going on there too – they could never run the way they do if they weren’t.

And on Saturday those dedicated workers were rewarded with the smooth running of big, big days in three different places. 40 years later the Easter festivals, amazingly are bigger than ever, and as good as they have ever been.