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.