Craven Week number 31 for me

 

I said I wasn’t going to make the trek to Krugersdorp to watch the Craven Week this year, but I lied. It was the thought of sitting in the traffic for an hour each way that turned me off, but the FOMO got me in the end, and I drove out there on Tuesday.

I’m not sorry I did. I wanted to see for myself if what I, and others who, like me, have been around like me for while, suspected –  the Lions selectors have  stuffed it up again – and after watching them go down to the Bulls, I’m afraid it loooks like they have.

But mainly, I guess, I wanted to say that I was there in 2024. I didn’t go to the 1994 Craven Week in Newcastle, for some reason, but I was at the 2004 week in Nelspruit, and in Middelburg in 2014, and I was in Secunda in 1993 – so there’s three decades of attendance right there.

The first time I attended the week was actually in 1985, before I became a newspaper reporter. It was in Witbank, close enough for a hotheaded young coach to drive to, and there were a couple of my players from Highlands North Boys’ High in the, then, two Transvaal sides. So, the coach of one of the other English schools that had a representation and I, went there on all three days.

Then, in 1988, I was made the manager of the Transvaal XV that played in Port Elizabeth, and in 1989 I was the coach of the Transvaal A team that won the main game at Ellis Park – it was the Centenary of the Transvaal, now Lions, Union. The coaching appointments in those days were a bit of an emeritus position, rotated between members of the High Schools Committee.

It was in 1989 that I first got a job as a freelancer at The Star, and it was a reporter that I attended the 1990 week in Durban. I missed out in just three years after that, including 1994 in Newcastle, but I was at every other Craven Week until my last as a reporter in Paarl in 2018. Add in this year, and that makes 31 in all. I don’t know if that’s a proud or a pathetic record, but I’m pretty sure it’s unique, certainly there is no-one still going to the events who has been around as long as I have.

So, you can see why I decided to go to Monument on Tuesday after all. The Craven Week is, of course no longer anything like it  was through most of those years. When it was started by Piet Malan in 1964, endorsed by Dr Craven, it was a celebration of schoolboy rugby. Craven absolutely insisted the emphasis was on playing open, attractive rugby and that winning wasn’t the primary aim.

The “main” game was awarded to the two teams that played the “best” rugby. It wasn’t a “final” and I remember Dr Craven chewing out the SAPA reporter in the press box one year because the Citizen used that word in the headline to his article.

The advent of full TV coverage, of sponsors who call the tune and the “professionalisation” of the game changed all of that. It’s become a knockout tournament for the most successful unions now. Round one is quarterfinals, the four winners meet in round two and the last two standing play in the final on Saturday. And it’s officially called a final in the SA Rugby correspondence, and the winners are referred to as the champions.

All the fixtures for the final day used to be allocated on that basis of the best rugby played. Nowadays, it seems, they have become classification games ala knockout tournaments, and Boland, for example, who played great rugby by all accounts and won both their earlier games are relegated to the B field, simply because from the get-go they were never given an opportunity to play one of the big guns. Dr Craven would never have allowed it.

The best players from the schools in the Boland region are, of course, playing for Western Province, who have two teams at the Craven Week, and third at the U18 Academy Week – but that’s a different balls-up that no-one has the balls to address, I’m afraid

Back to those Lions selections. It’s a rugby truism that if your second team is highly competitive with your first (even to the point of besting them in training games) then you don’t have a very good second team, you’ve got a big selection problem!

That’s happened with the Lions for two years in a row. The Academy Week team is cleaning up in its competition again this year - they (pictured above) won the main game 45-25 against EP today - while the Craven Week team (with some exceptions obviously) again looks quite ordinary.

There are players in the B team who should have been in the A team. Simple as that!

 

I love the Craven week, but not the cold

 

I Googled it, the phrase “in the bleak midwinter” comes from a poem by Christina Rossetti, later set to music by Gustave Holst, and sung as a Christman Carol.

 The opening verse paints as good a word picture as any you’ll find: It’s enough to make you want to spend the day in bed, but then you remember that Midwinter’s Day – June 21 – is on Friday, and they are prediciting weather much like today (June 19): a bit nippy to start with, but with a short-sleeves 22 degree peak at 2pm.

Here's how it goes:

'In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.’ 

And three days later, on June 24, the Craven Week begins. I attended more Craven Weeks than most people – a colleague in the media once declared that I was at more them than anyone alive, although I’m quite sure that isn’t true – and while I miss those days awfully, I’m not that sad that I won’t be cold when I watch the games on my TV this year.

I remember the words of two of the great characters around the week in my early days, both long departed. Piet Kranouw reminded us as we were planning to travel one year that “two things are true – there’s no such thing as weak SE Transvaal (now Pumas) team, and that you never go to the Craven Week without a coat.” Then I remember the inimitable Zandberg Jansen speak of Bloemfontein’s “eiesoortige vrek koud” (unique deathly cold).

There are hordes of boys and girls and parents and officials in the City of Roses over the next two weeks for the SA Schools hockey IPTs, and I thought of them this morning when I turned on another panel on the gas heater.

The U18 Craven Week is at Monument this year, where it will probably be quite balmy, and I know the hospitality in Krugersdorp will be the customary country-town Craven Week warm, but I don’t know if I’ll be going there – the prospect of two hours in the traffic each day on Ontdekkers Road or Hendrick Potgieter (take your pick) is as bleak as that winter’s day that Rossetti so brilliantly describes.

Still, the Craven Week is one of the very best in the year, I will miss it.

Maybe uncover some new cases of abuse instead of rehashing the old ones?

I’ve watched the first two episodes of the School Ties series on M-Net and find myself wondering what the point of it is.

Child abuse, sexual and other, is entirely reprehensible and it must be rooted out by whatever means. The power that coaches and teachers have over the children in their care can be abused, and that is happening in schools, and sports clubs.

There have been enough cases in the media to show that this has happened in some of the so-called elite schools in this country and, clearly, schools have a duty to ensure that these things should never happen in their communities.

That’s non-debatable. But why, I wonder, is M-Net regurgitating cases from the not so recent past? Apart from anything else, it’s lazy journalism. The two episodes so far deal with the David McKenzie affair at St Andrew’s College and Collan Rex’s conviction of hundreds of cases at Parktown Boys’ High. Both of those were covered in the My Only Story podcast three years ago, and in the press. They were repeated in an edition of Carte Blanche earlier this year. Samantha Cowan wrote a book (her School Ties title has been appropriated for this series) and she features on camera in the Parktown episode, repeating her conclusions.

Episode two ended with a teaser indicating that the next story will be that of the tragic events at St John’s Prep School and College, which were also aired in that Carte Balance edition.

There’s no harm in retelling these stories and in analysing their significance, again and again - if they act as a cautionary tale and constantly sharpen awareness among children and their parents. I think it might have been more valuable, however, if the makers of this series had rather gone looking for other incidents (and the experts quoted intimate that these things are quite common in our schools).

The real problem, I feel, is that the schools involved are not being helped by the re-opening of these cases. There doesn’t seem to be much confidence in their ability to proceed down a different path, committed to being the sorts of places where these things cannot happen again. 

The statements by the schools are displayed, without comment, but I get the feeling that they are being perceived as empty promises. Whether those cases were rogue outliers or part of an established toxic system, as alleged by some of the experts, the schools now have a duty to carry on educating their learners in many complex ways. That’s difficult enough without being made to account again for matters closed some time ago, and without being left alone to carry on with the process of rebuilding and continuing to safeguard those in their care.

I also have a particular problem with something that was said at the end of the 1st episode. Deon Wiggett, the My Only Story man, fires a broadside at the sport of water polo and, in it, he repeats the statement he made in the last of those podcasts that Mark Evans, a teacher and polo coach at DSG in Grahamstown, had been accused of inappropriate behaviour by some of the girls he coached.

Evans was suspended by the school, pending a Disciplinary Enquiry. In January 2022 I got hold of a letter sent to the DSG community by the headmaster in which he details the process followed in the enquiry (a legally sound and exhaustive one) and announces that Evans was found not guilty of all the charges.

He quotes the findings of Advocate Ryno Eksteen, the independent chairman of the DE:

He was satisfied that the evidence presented did not support the conclusion that the teacher concerned had acted inappropriately or had failed to conform to DSG’s standards of conduct and the SACE Code of Conduct in his interaction with learners.

He specifically found no evidence of the teacher making undue physical contact with learners or intruding on their dignity in any manner (whether while coaching water polo or in the classroom).

In a letter to its parents, written after the airing of the School Ties programme, the school explains that while the investigation initiated by DSG was being conducted and the disciplinary enquiry concluded, the South African Council for Educators (SACE) was conducting its own investigation, which was concluded in March 2022. On 25 May 2022, DSG received the findings of the SACE Ethics Committee in a formal communication, which informed the school that an investigation into the allegations had been conducted, and the Council could not find sufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations. On 31 March 2022, the Ethics Committee deliberated on the matter and recommended that the file be closed pending new/tangible information. 

As a result of those findings Evans was reinstated as a teacher. Is repeating the allegations, despite the exoneration, permissible? Surely it can’t be left there?

I assume M-Net is getting the viewership numbers it is hoping for with this production. I wonder where they will be going to after St John’s. Will they then do their jobs as investigative journalists and uncover a new case? And will they leave the schools already affected alone to carry out the duty of care that we all demand of them? 

    

Full on commitment, with smiles on faces

 

Just when the immovable weight of win-at-all costs schoolboy rugby was getting me down, I was given a breath of fresh air on Wednesday night, and a reminder of the value of organised activity for school kids; of the willingness of children to work extremely hard if it’s at something they love doing; and of the skill, dedication and passion that adults (teachers and others) have for setting up learning experiences for those children.

And it came in, for me, a strange place, an area I know very little of – music. Jeppe are hosting a cultural festival this week – an attempt to give their non-sporting stars a taste of what the rugby and other sports team get when they are invited to the various interschool gatherings every year.

Wednesday night was a music festival and I was roped in to go along and take pictures. There were seven schools there – choirs, marimbas and bands – and it was just amazing. I was a reluctant audience member at first but I came away awed.

Clearly you don’t get to be as good as those singers and players are without hours and hours of practice (probably more than the sportsmen put in), and it made (to my uneducated ear, anyway) for some top class performances from everyone.

What really struck me, though, was that everyone – on stage and off – seemed to be having the time of their lives. They performed with joy when they were up there, and they were on their feet and invested when they were in the audience. And there was whole-hearted appreciation and acclaim from everyone for everyone else.

I sat surrounded by them and experienced the amazing way in which they sang their own words, in perfect harmony, along with what was being played onstage. It was the magic of musicians jamming along that I’ve read about but never really seen.

And during interval there was an impromptu massed choir involving just about everyone, outside the hall singing, beautifully, a song that they somehow all knew the words of.

I know there are interschool competitions in some of these activities, Wednesday wasn’t one, yet I saw commitment and passion equal to what you see at 1^st team rugby matches, and it all happened with wide, white-toothed smiles on faces, everywhere.

It’s unfair to single any one act out, but if I ever get the chance to watch the Parktown Boys’ High School brass band again, or the Greenside High School choir, I’m grabbing it.

These players are no good - let's buy some new ones

 

There’s been a bit of chatter recently about an old, unoriginal issue – recruitment of schoolboy rugby players.

I read everything that Alan Miles publishes on his blog - https://coachtalk.wordpress.com - he eloquently expresses views on school sport that I whole heartedly agree with.

His most recent piece, titled Integrity-driven success in schoolboy rugby dives into the pretty much ubiquitous (among the top rugby schools anyway) area of recruitment. He’s talking about the practice of attracting players to your school on bursaries, who would otherwise not have come there on their own.

While there may be good reasons to give a boy an opportunity when, for financial reasons, he would never have gone to a certain school, his ability to help your 1st team win matches shouldn’t be one of them.

Miles goes on to list a number of things that are wrong with pursuing success by following that route. The pressure on the player who knows he is only there to win games for the school; the obscene sums of money spent on recruitment, and how it could be used to develop all the players in the school; the absence of old-fashioned teacher-coaches in the system; the instilling of dreams of post-school glory in the minds of those players, knowing full well that very few of them will make it to the professional level.

I was tempted to throw my two cents in after reading that, but resisted, mainly because it makes me look like an old fogey who tells the same stories over and over. But then I was sent a link to a voice clip originating, it seems, from an Old Boys/Supporters WhatsApp group discussing what needs to be done following yet another defeat for their school’s 1^st team.

After listening to it, I was reminded of the title of Alan Mile’s piece – Integrity-driven success in schoolboy rugby – and it occurred to me that you could use what’s being proposed as an example what integrity-driven success definitely is not!

I’m not going to put the link up. It’s the sort of thing that gets around, so I’m sure many of you have heard it already. I’m not going to be the one who spreads these sorts of things, and it’s not an original story - the exact conversation takes place in many schools these days. I’d wager.

I’ll tell you briefly what was said, and what is wrong with it.

In essence, the speaker informs us that the coaches have gone as far as they can go with the 1^st team – these players will never be good enough to beat their rivals, so it’s time to give up on them and go shopping for replacements. What a thing to say in an educational context. The coaches aren’t teachers, they’re ex-players (a Google search told me that). An educator who declares that a child in his care cannot be developed any further and so he is abandoning him, should surely be dismissed, on the spot.

It gets worse. Not only is this lot not good enough, the speaker believes, but we cannot trust the future generation of players at the school, and the system in place, to ever produce a winning team again. So, it’s time to introduce a proper rugby programme at the school, starting from Under-14. And what he means by that is that they need to bring in 10 to 15 players per year, on bursaries from now on. And it should start now – there’s a professional scout, he says, who has identified five Grade 11 players who can be brought on board straight away, to salvage the rest of the season and build for next year.

He has had contact with old boys who are willing to help with that, and he will co-ordinate it.

Then he invokes the “Lance Armstrong” rationalisation – our rival schools are doing it, so we have to do it too. And to hell with the ethics and educational values!

As my friend who sent me the clip says: “The plot has genuinely been lost. How awful to play a sport under these conditions.”

 

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.