The Khaya Majola Week is the beautiful face of SA Cricket

It’s been unseasonably cold and damp in the KZN Midlands the last two days, although some are saying it’s often that way up here over Christmas and that Town Hill is a merciful barrier between this part of the world at the heat and humidity of Durban and the coastal belt. It’s been dry enough to play cricket, though, and the three centuries and six five-wicket hauls notched up on day 1 of the Khaya Majola Week on Monday show that the 300-odd under-19 boys in action here this week are in the mood for it.

Whenever I’m at this tournament, I’m dumbstruck by the hordes of grown up people who have given up a week of their hard-earned leave - the week before Christmas, no less - to organise and run an event for 17 and 18 year-olds, with no remuneration. In fact in many cases it will be costing them money to be here.

The Khaya Majola Week is run with military precision. A local organising committee has been working all year on the arrangements and Morgan Pillay, the week's permanent secretary and the tournament director, will be keeping an eye on things, and using his charm and particular brand of emotional blackmail to get people to do extraordinary things beyond the call of why they got involved in the first place. 

Cricket South Africa’s manager of youth and amateur cricket Niels Momberg’s formidable presence is also always there, looming in the background, refusing to accept excuses, and not suffering fools gladly.

The upshot is that for the kids it’s a seamless week of fun in the sun. The fields are always immaculate, and alternatives miraculously appear if and when rain spoils the party; there are umpires; scorers; drinks and lunches and transportation to the many far-flung fields that a tournament of this scale requires.

The school fields that I was at on the first day, at Michaelhouse and Hilton, on Monday have to rate among the most beautiful I’ve seen, and I’ve seen most of them in this country. The distances between them are considerable, but they are linked by the scenic roads of the Midlands Meander, there are worse areas to be driving through.

And at the heart of it all are the teacher volunteers. They spend hours running the game at their own schools and then find more time to attend trials, select and prune squads, coach and manage teams through pre-tournament friendlies and then give up their holidays. Luckily, very few of them are unionised, Sadtu wouldn’t allow that sort of abuse of its members.

They make up the numbers in every rank of the organising structures: local committee, organisers, lunch ladies, umpires and hostel staff where the boys are staying.

And in the process, hangers-on like me are treated royally and, thanks to Morgan Pillay in particular, made to feel welcome and appreciated.

It’s what makes the Khaya Majola Week the envy of the other cricket-playing nations. If the ugly underbelly of South African cricket was exposed last week, this week it's turning its fairest face to the (somewhat watery) sunlight of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.

Day 1’s summarised scorecards:

KwaZulu-Natal Inland first innings 151 (Michael Booth 30, Nicholas Hatten 29; Merrick Brett 4/19, Zeeshan Ismail 2/27); Northerns first innings 174 (Jordan Hermann 115; Sanele Mbatha 3/19, Michael Booth 3/29, Michael Frost 3/57). Northerns won on first innings.

Eastern Province first innings 250/8 (James Mullins 95, Luke Beaufort 56, Nicholas Keevy 39; Nathan Jacobs 6/46); Boland first innings 157/9 (Johann Smal 68, Nathan Engelbrecht 37; Tiaan van Vuuren 3/18, Ethan Frosler 3/18). Match Drawn.

Free State first innings 200 (JP Coetzee 61, Ruan Cronjé 42, Michael Kershaw 28; Sebastian de Oliveira 3/22); Gauteng first innings 236/5 (Levert Manje 81*, Jack Lees 51, Nick Halstead-Cleak 30, Cameron Rowe 28); Free State second innings 34/2 (Marco de Kock 24*). Gauteng won on first innings.

Western Province first innings 231/7 (Daniel Smith 130, Lehan Botha 39; Joshua Stocks 2/28); KwaZulu-Natal first innings 136/3 (Francis Moran 51*, Thulani Chiliza 33, Cade Carmichael 30; Raees Carr 2/31). Match Drawn.

South Western Districts first innings 231/8 (Heath Richards 117, Jhedli van Briesies 51; Boitumelo Melesi 3/51, Elrich Cloete 3/87); Northern Cape first innings 154 (Orapeleng Mothlhoaring 64, Joshua Barends 40; Heath Richards 5/1). South Western Districts won on first innings.

Mpumalanga first innings 131 (Kyle Klesse 25; Leander Lubbe 5/27, Saahil Khan 2/15); Easterns first innings 148/8 (WP Myburgh 52*, Adriaan de Vries 45; Zuan Swart 2/14, Akhulile Makatu 2/17). Mpumalanga 8/0. Easterns won on first innings.

North West first innings 166 (Estiaan Schonfeldt 58, Francois Viviers 27; Stefan Bezuidenhout 5/28); Namibia first innings 154 (Ramon Wilmot 42, JC Balt 35; Karabelo Matlawe 4/39, Odirile Modikoane 3/25); North West second innings 39/0 (Paballo Sibande 18*). North West won on first innings.

Limpopo first innings 77 (Saba Mridha 31; Lilitha Reed 5/9, Nonelela Yikha 2/9); Border first innings 103 (Nonelela Yikha 49; Thomas Mayes 5/14, Tiaan Enslin 2/2, Ricardo Booysen 2/17); Limpopo second innings 70/5 (Nhlamulo Mboweni 22; Nqaba Peter 2/3); Border second innings 45/3 (Nonelela Yikha 17*; Gerhardus Fourie 2/4). Border won outright.

Overwhelming victories are for fascists, bullies and braggarts

I got drawn into a debate on Sunday around the massive scores being posted at the SA Schools water polo tournament currently under way in Joburg. Obviously, I don't believe there is a place for that sort of thing in school sport.

One team won 45-0, another 34-1. Both of those would translate, in rugby terms, to scores close to, or even over, 100-0.

I was about to go off on it again, but then I remembered I've already done that, so in the interests of saving electricity this load-shedding season, here's a link to what I wrote (in a rugby context) back in July 2018. Nothing's changed, you wouldn't expect that to have happened, it would require people growing a conscience and showing a little humanity, things that are in short supply when the rush of victory takes over.


http://theogarrun.blogspot.com/2018/07/100-point-wins-dont-do-anyone-any-good.html

10 of the best in 2019

School closes this week. The interprovincial tournaments for the summer sports begin next weekend, so it’s time to look back over the year and think of the players, teams and events that stood out.

It’s a purely self-indulgent exercise. I used to do it when I was still at the newspaper, and I decided to keep going here after I’d given that up. In those days, when I was travelling about a lot, watching schools sport, I used to limit my list to things that I had actually seen in person. That was useful because I could excuse the glaring omissions that would always occur by saying I wasn’t there.

I don’t have that luxury anymore, so all I can offer is that the following is purely objective. Yes it’s biased towards what I’m familiar with and of course you could easily come up with another 10 as worthy of inclusion if not more so.

It’s just a bit of nostalgia, without much worth.

In no particular order:

Let’s get the hardy perennials out of the way up front.

1 St Benedict’s won the boys trophy at the SA Schools Rowing champs at Roodeplaat for the 26^th year in a row in March. Someone will eventually stop them, logic dictates, just don’t ask me who that’s going to be.

2 Just as amazingly, Northcliff High School won the Joburg co-ed schools A league athletics interhigh inter-high Athletics for the 23^rd consecutive year. Again, they say that no team stays unbeaten forever. Apparently no-one has told the Northcliff athletes that.

3 Not in the same class, but starting to put a nice run together is the 1^st hockey team at Jeppe High School for Boys. They won the Aitken Trophy for the fifth year in a row. They were unbeaten for the second year in a row and ended as the top-ranked side in the land.

There were many great individual performances in the year. Here are a couple:

4 Bryce Parsons of King Edward was named the player of the Khaya Majola Week and the SA under-19 cricketer of the year. I don’t think that’s happened before. He also captained the under-19 national side and will probably lead them at the ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup in the new year.

5 Max Chaumeton’s remarkable school running career came to an end without him ever losing a 1500m race. The Parktown athlete came 28^th in the world at the junior cross-country champs and has represented the country on the track as well, He is clearly an Olympian in the making.

6 St Stithians won the Coke T20 Schools Challenge title for the fourth time. They beat St Charles in the final at Tuks in March.

7 Western Province’s dominance of schools rugby continued. Their Craven Week side thumped the Sharks in the main game of that week, and their B side were so impressive in the same week that there was talk at one stage of the two WP sides being matched in the final. Western Province also won the main games at the u-19 Academy Week and the under-16 Grant Khomo Week.

8 It was impossible not to enjoy watching the 2019 St John’s College rugby team play. They lost to Jeppe by a singe point and drew with King Edward and beat all their other local rivals. In the process they played as if they were really enjoying themselves. No conservative smashing the ball up and playing the phases for them. They gave the ball air and their outside backs scored the tries. It was a breath of fresh air.

9 The OJ Eagles water polo club, representing Central Gauteng, won the water polo national title (the Currie Cup, incidentally) for the fifth year in a row and the 14^th time in the last 19 years.

10 The St Stithians Girls College Water Polo team finished the year unbeaten, They were the top-ranked team and they won five major tournaments: St Anne’s; the Girls Schools Aquatic Champs; the Roedean Prestige Cup the Reef Cup and the St Peter’s tournament.

SA Schools Rugby Challenge raises red flags

I was trawling around, looking for something to crack wise about when this was announced today:

https://rugbyrocks.com/top-sa-rugby-schools-to-compete-for-national-crown/

There’s going to be, they say, an SA Schools Rugby Challenge competition from 2021, involving the eight “top” schools in the land in a 13-team per school league, with points awarded and a champion school determined.

Many South African sports fans seem to be obsessed with the idea that every sporting activity needs to be run as a formal competition, with an eventual winner being determined. I get that, there’s certainly little point in playing a game if winning is not the aim. I do believe, however, that organising sport at schools along those lines is wrong. Schools are educational institutions and their sports activities are part of their educational programmes, that’s non-negotiable. There are way too many examples of the things that can go wrong when winning rather than development becomes the dominant value.

And the SA Schools Challenge will be about winning. That raises all sorts of red flags and the biggest one is that it will focus and amplify the identification and recruitment of the top talent available and further funnel it into a handful of schools.

The fact that the preliminary statement put out by the organisers speaks of excluding players who begin at a school after the first few weeks of their grade 11 year shows that they anticipate that player movement between schools and poaching can be an issue. However, the fact that this exclusion only applies to the under-19 section shows that they don’t object to the practice in principle, they just want to regulate the timing of it.

There hasn’t been any talk of prize money or TV coverage but I’m sure that those are on the agenda. It’s going to be so important to the schools involved to win that they will have to ensure that they have the right players in their ranks. And that, recently history has shown, has resulted in a scorched earth approach to talent identification with little concern for the schools that the recruited players come from.

The attempt by the competition’s spokesperson to show that it isn’t an elitist exercise because the schools will use other, lesser, rugby schools as “fillers” when they can’t meet their fixture obligations, apart from being condescending and partronising, is surely dangerous to those schools. Won’t they be giving the top school a good look at their players? And for how long will they be retaining the best of them?

There are two reasons for running a rugby programme at a school: to further educate your learners via the sport, and to promote the development of the sport on a wider scale. Doing what it will take to be successful in a competition such as this one will meet neither of those requirements.

It isn’t a single story, of course. Schools do have an obligation to give their star performers every opportunity to shine. A few of them may have a future as professional players and they need all of them to act as role models and motivators for the younger players coming through.

This leads me to another issue. The Craven Week, the platform on which the stars were seen in the past is under threat. It was also announced on Sunday that the future of the interprovincial schools week is in doubt:

https://rugbyrocks.com/craven-week-could-be-cancelled/

It’s about sponsorship, SA Rugby says, but the week was losing relevance in the eyes of the top schools anyway. The emphasis has moved to development, with increasingly stringent quotas being introduced, leaving fewer and fewer places for white players. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, in fact it’s probably right, but the Craven Week is not what it used to be.

It’s led to festivals like the Wildeklawer and the various North-South long weekends becoming more and more prestigious. Given that schools have a responsibility to their top players, they support events like those where they play against the other top ones. Those are festivals, without winners though. Hence the SA Schools Rugby Challenge.

There are going to be some great games to watch, but not, I suspect, much ethical education on show.

I've been away, and it's been quite a journey

I’ve been away from this space for quite a while and I think I owe an explanation to the two or three people who have told me they have wondered where I’d gone.

The answer to that has question has several parts. Those who, like me, have left the salaried, formal employment sector – in my case I left against my will, along with 100-odd others who were deemed surplus to the good doctor’s plans to turn Independent Newspapers into a great South African media organisation – will know about operating in the gig economy. It means, in short, that you accept every bit of work that comes your way, at rates so low that you have no choice but to accept the next assignment at similarly cut-throat remuneration, and before you know it you are caught up in a cycle with not much time for anything else.

In the middle of all that, a project came along that I have really come to believe in. I was asked to help with the writing of the second book on the Partners for Possibility programme (PfP). It’s a school leadership programme that sees the principals of under-resourced schools partnered with business leaders on a year-long, structured journey designed to capacitate and empower the principal to lead her school. I won’t go into details – buy the book the next year – but the programme has been running for 10 years now and there have been close to 1500 partnerships, most of them continuing well beyond that first formal year.

They haven’t all worked, but the majority have had a positive effect on the schools, and there have been some spectacular success stories. Chasing those success stories has occupied most of my time for the last six months, so there has been little left over for my other big love: the development of decent human beings through the medium of sport.

If I had to name the one thing that all those school partnership success stories had in common it would be that the business leaders went into the school without judgement, they didn’t try to fix things, they were there to listen to the principals and cheer them on as they worked out for themselves how to turn schools that were often in the most desperate condition into quality learning institutions.

I’ve seen what a classroom with 80 kids in it looks like. I’ve been to schools where the meal provided to the kids at school each day is the only one they will eat that day, and I’ve heard how thieves steal anything of value that a school may acquire, immediately after they acquire it, every time.

But I’ve also seen what can be done in schools when the principal is energised and capacitated.

And in all the places I visited, there was a business leader, usually from the local community or the nearby affluent town or suburb at the principal’s side. I’ve seen ex-pupils who have succeeded against the odds who want to go back to make a difference; brilliant housewives with business experience and too much time on their hands now; middle level corporate managers who have been sent on the journey as part of their executive development; and I’ve seen conservative Afrikaner farmers who have rolled up their sleeves and become involved in the schools that the children of their workers attend.

It’s been a life-changing experience and it made me realise that there is way more to education in this country than what goes on at the schools where I have worked and that I have been to watch sport at in recent times. The kids at the dysfunctional schools in South Africa, and there are 20 000 of those, will never have a chance unless someone steps up and tries to change things. I know where the blame lies, before and after 1994, and I know who should be fixing the system. There are men and women out there who know that too, but that’s not stopping them from trying to change lives anyway.

They do that in many different ways, and the PfP programme is one of them. It’s been quite a journey for me, I’m hoping it will be over in time for next year’s Easter Rugby Festivals.