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.