It's starting at primary school level now

Here we go again. The start of the rugby season is still a month away and already we have one school refusing to play another. It’s about player poaching, again, and while it’s disappointing, no-one should really be surprised.

The schools involved, DHS and Glenwood, have been grouchy neighbours up on the Berea for a long time and Glenwood can’t seem to keep away from this kind of controversy. There’s been a perception for a while now that the school looks for talented players in other places and tries to lure them to their ranks. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but certainly none of the top schools in Joburg will play any kind of sport against them. It’s not the first time DHS has called off relations, for the same reason.

So, not an original story. What’s different this time is the age group level at which this one is playing out. The boys involved are in grade 8 – 13 year-olds - and, it seems, deals were done and money was paid during their primary school years already.

There’s a memorandum of understanding that was signed by the heads of the boys-only schools to the effect that they will not approach players who are at other schools. It’s well-intentioned, although it’s significant that most of the recent well-publicised controversies, including this one, involve schools that are signatories to the agreement.

That said, there seems to be an acceptance that when it comes to grade 7s deciding on which high school they will be going to, the gloves are off and it’s an open market that everyone can participate in. OK, but I have expressed the (very much minority) opinion that at such a young age in particular, educational and ethical values should still apply. I have been to the under-13 Craven Week and seen the talent scouts from the top (and wannabee top) schools standing on the touchlines, clipboards in hand and cheque books in the back pocket, running their eyes over the young flesh on display like trainers and breeders at the thoroughbred yearling sales.

It was only a matter of time before things went awry and these practices hit the headlines.

What happened In Durban is happening in other places too. Briefly, DHS paid for the schooling at Glenwood Prep (unfortunately named, it turned out), of two KZN Primary Schools rugby players on the understanding that they will go to DHS in grade 8. They reneged and are at Glenwood Boys’ High now, hence the outrage.

In the face of the fierce competition for the top primary school players, the recruitment people at the high schools have to act quickly to sign the right 13-year olds up, and they need to have the right deals to offer. A way of getting around that is to get in 1^st and seal a commitment while the child is in grade 7, or even in grade 6. Pay for his primary schooling and contract him to come to your high school eventually.

Now, I’m totally in agreement with the principle of offering financial assistance to needy parents who cannot afford to send their talented offspring to a good school. I’ll even go along with the idea of funding primary school education with the aim of giving a bright young child a solid grounding so that he or she has a better chance of success in secondary school.

That’s not what’s happening with these rugby players. This is the win-at-all-costs attitude sinking to new moral depths. The practice should be outlawed and no-one should play against schools who subscribe to it, whether they are enrolling the children they have groomed themselves, or stolen them from someone else.  

Are the rugby youth weeks necessary?

Changes to the arrangements for this year’s youth rugby interprovincial weeks were announced this week and, it seems, there are issues at SA Rugby and its affiliate the SA Schools Rugby Association, that are deeper than just the financial woes associated with the loss of Coca-Cola as the sponsor of their annual winter Youth Week programme.

A few years ago they grouped together the under-13 Craven Week and the under-16 Grant Khomo Week; and the under-18 Academy and Craven Weeks - each pair to be played at the same venue – because it was more economical that way. A unified organising committee and reduced travel arrangements, along with the economies of scale would make for cheaper tournaments.

That was true. They are sticking to that, but the groupings have changed. The u-13 Craven and u-18 Academy Weeks will run together in Johannesburg this year, and the u-18 Craven and under-16 Grant Khomo Weeks will be on at the same time in Port Elizabeth.

No reasons have been officially given for the re-arrangement. The unofficial word going around seems to indicate that have it all wrong. They need the two elite high school weeks to be together, apparently, because of the people who have to attend them. That translates into the SA Rugby big-wigs who want to watch them. Sure, there are talent identification people who need to be there, but my experience is that there are many VIP hangers-on at these occasions who don’t. Their travel and accommodation costs are what are gobbling up the available funding.

And, you have to ask, why relegate the under-18 “B” Academy Week to a minor event (it isn’t budgeted for by SA Rugby this year, I read somewhere). Selection margins are small, and factors other than only merit go into the choosing of teams – more of that later – so saying that the important people don’t need to watch those teams play seems to be a crazy narrowing down of the talent identification process.

As for the under-13 Craven Week, why not just tank it, or turn it into two regional festivals, North and South? The relevance of a week at this level has often been questioned on rugby and physiological grounds, with research pointing out how few under-13 provincial players go on to perform at the same level in high school.

Then you have to wonder what the ongoing value of the under-18 Craven Week is. The announcement of the new arrangements includes a commitment to SA Rugby's Strategic Transformation Plan 2030. This means that each squad of 23 players has to field a minimum of 12 players of colour. It is also stated that foreign players at SA Schools cannot be included in those numbers any more.

I have often stressed that transformation of the game is non-negotiable. How it’s done is the issue, however, and forcing quotas onto elite teams without having done the developmental hard work at the levels below is just daft. Increasing the size of the quotas doesn’t mean there will be more developing of players of colour who can perform at those levels.

If the Craven Week is to be regarded as one of the places at which that development is done, or as an opportunity to identify players with the potential to be further developed, that’s fine. It just won’t be the elite under-18 rugby tournament anymore.

Some argue that it hasn’t been that for a while now. The big inter-school festivals –the Noord-Suid weekend in Pretoria and the Wildeklawer gathering in Kimberley – have taken on that role.

The 1^st teams of all the top schools in the country are at those, and while there is no 12:23 quota in place there are players of colour in action there, chosen entirely on merit. Most of those will also be at the Craven Week later on in the year.

The talent scouts are at those events now as are, worryingly, the recruitment people of many overseas rugby clubs.

Let’s face it, the Youth Weeks aren’t that much of a big deal anymore and shuffling the deck chairs around isn’t really going to stop the ship from sinking.

Looking back at 10 school sport years

In 2009, when I was still at The Star, I was asked to compile a list of my 10 school sporting highlights of the decade that was just ending to go along with similar lists drawn up by the reporters on the various sporting beats the paper covered.

I don’t remember much of it, but I think the exercise must have been quite easy because I had the archives to dig into to look for the standout teams and players over the previous 10 years.

I thought it might be fun to repeat the exercise for the 20-teens, although it’s not so simple without an article library to go to, and with my fading memory.

Here goes anyway – and I’m using the dodgy memory excuse to explain anyone I’ve left out. And yes, it’s biased towards Joburg where I live. I have only included events that I was personally at.

In roughly chronological order:

1 St Benedict’s rowing. They would have been on my 2009 list. In that year they won the boys trophy at the SA Schools Rowing Championships for the 16th time in a row, which was pretty remarkable. Well, they haven’t lost since and were crowned for the 26th consecutive time at Roodeplaat this year.

2 In 2010 Bree Primary School took the under-13 title at the Danone Nations Cup international football tournament at the Orlando Stadium. The Joburg school should have competed in 2009 in Brazil, but the event was cancelled because of the swine flu epidemic that year. So, they ran it together with the 2010 event in South Africa, and Bree won at home – the third South African team to take the title at the 52-nation event.

3 In 2011 King Edward VII School became the first school to win all three sections in Joburg’s T20 Johnny Waite cricket knockout competition. Their 1st, 2nd and 3rd teams beat St Stithians in all three finals.

4 At a triangular athletics meeting at Jeppe in 2015 I watched two world top 10 athletes in action. Patrick Duvenhage of KES was ranked in the top 10 on the planet in his age group in both discus and shotput at the time while Jeppe’s Mpho Tladi ran the world’s quickest time in the under-16 100m hurdles earlier in the year.

5 Ruan de Swardt of Affies became just the 13th sportsman to make the South African Schools cricket and rugby teams. He was selected for the rugby side at the Craven Week in  July 2016 and made the cricket side at the end of the year. The previous player to do the "double" had been Martizburg College’s Adrian Penzhorn in 2002.

6 Remarkably, the next player to achieve that feat was Grey College’s Christopher Schreuder, the very next year.

7 At the 2017 boys schools interhigh meeting at St David’s, Lythe Pillay of King Edward VII school won the 100m, 200m and 400, races in time of 10.8; 21.6 and 48.6, respectively. He has gone on to do even better since, but that was the day he announced himself as a future superstar.

8 Travis Gordon of King Edward VII School captained the South African Schools rugby team in 2017. He was the first player from that school to do so and it came at the end of one of the best seasons in memory by a KES 1st team.

9 In 2018 Jeppe High School for Boys won all three of Joburg’s hockey trophies - the under-19 Aitken Cup, the under-15 Boden Trophy, and the under-16 Top 8 tournament. Their 1st team won the Aitken again in 2019 – for the 5th year in a row.

10 Max Chaumeton of Parktown Boys’ High came 28th at World Cross Country Championships in 2019. He went on the make the final of the mens 1500m race at the SA Athletics Championships. He ended his school athletics career without ever losing a 1500m race.

11 One more, lasting the whole decade really: the rise of girls water polo as a school sport. 10 years ago it hardly featured, now it’s the fastest growing sport at schools. There are big tournaments all over the country including two in Joburg, the St Peter’s Old Petrians and the Saints Stayers at St Stithians. Both were won this year by St Stithians Girls College who have emerged as the top girls polo school in the land.

Which school is really our oldest?

The announcement that Hans Coetzee will be going to Hoërskool Durbanville as a rugby coach (and that’s great news for him and the school) included the line that they are building towards a successful 200th Anniversary year in 2026.

That got some people doing arithmetic and they found it means the school was established in 1827, which puzzled a few associated with Cape Town’s SACS, the school that most people (me included) refer to as our oldest school – established in 1829.

On their website, Durbanville say they are SA’s second-oldest school, without saying who the oldest is, which makes SACS only the 3rd oldest, and that confuses matters even more.

It’s an old can of worms, one that I've researched before and I found then that the origins of most schools are shrouded in the mists of time and often a bit dodgy.

SACS is accepted as the oldest, but its early days were tied to UCT - they even have the same badge - and Paul Roos, similarly, was part of Stellenbosch University.

Jeppe and KES are both Milner Schools (established in 1903), yet Jeppe's Centenary was in 1989 and KES celebrated theirs in 2002, which means they both claim to have been founded prior to Lord Milners’s 1903 proclamation. They, like many of our older schools,  trace their ancestry to earlier institutions (some of which can only loosely be called schools) from which they evolved.

Muir College's Website has their establishment date as 1822.  But, according to Wikipaedia, Uitenhage’s first Free Government School was opened in 1822. In 1875, the school, then known as the Public Undenominational School moved to Park Avenue and in 1892 the school’s name changed to the Muir Academy. Go figure!

It looks, from the history of the school on their website that Durbanville was once Pampoenkraal and a primary and high school were established there in 1827, so I suspect that they have taken that as the beginning of the current Hoërskool Durbanville.

Someone sent me a list of some 20, mainly primary, schools that were established before SACS, and Durbanville but I couldn't find any of them still operating under the names given. I suppose the test of a school's age should be how many years it existed as the school that is is known as now .

It's not important really, our traditional schools have all stood the test of time.

And Hans Coetzee was, at Monument, the most successful school rugby coach Gauteng has ever seen. Durbanville will be good in 2026, not matter how old the school may or may not be.

The best of the school cricket fields

 St Alban's

 Bishops

Michaelhouse

  

 SACS

St Charles

I’ve done this exercise before – I listed my 10 most beautiful schools rugby fields some time last year – and after spending a week at some pretty picturesque ovals in the KZN Midlands at the Khaya Majola Week recently, I thought I’d repeat the exercise for the summer game.

I’m going to take some flak, I know. Some didn’t agree with my rugby choices, so let me admit at the outset that this isn’t a survey. It’s a subjective listing, only of grounds that I have watched cricket at. I know there must be many others just as lovely, or better, I just haven’t been to them is all.

And of course there’s much more to it. Old boys, players and parents will be attached to their particular fields for all sorts of sentimental and emotional reasons that have nothing to do with the views from them, the trees around the boundary or the mountains in the background. That’s completely legitimate.

So, with none of that taken into consideration, here are the schools grounds, in order, that have made an impression on me:

1 Bridge House Franschoek

2 De Villiers Oval, SACS

3 Meadows, Michaelhouse

4 Frank Reid, Bishops

5 Pollock Oval, Grey High School

6 TC Mitchell Oval, St Alban’s College

7 Hart-Davis Oval, Hilton College

8 The Oval, St Charles College

9 Gathorne Oval, Michaelhouse

10 Rondebosch Boys’ High

It's main game day at the Khaya Majola Week

It was decided by someone, somewhere, a few years ago that the Khaya Majola Week should revert to being a festival, with no overall winner in the end.

That’s what it was for many years until, in 1995, it became a limited-overs knockout tournament, in two sections with cross-pool playoffs, semi-finals and a final, a winner’s trophy, and classification games all the way down to last position.

All the good reasons why they ran it that way then apparently disappeared and it was decreed that the week would follow the philosophy of the rugby Craven Week – that there is no winner and that the two teams that play the best rugby (cricket, in this case) will meet in the so called “main game” on the final day of the week.

At the Craven Week, for years now, no-one is buying the friendly, no winners or losers line, and the victorious team in the main game is called the champion team.

The same goes at this week, really. Gauteng were called the defending champions, coming in, and they will be going home from Michaelhouse without the title after failing to make the final. Before this they played in six out of seven main games and won five of them.

I’ve always rather liked the Corinthian spirit in sport, but even I have to confess that times have changed and that, these days, no-one’s really interested in a competition where there is no winner.

So, why not go all the way and bring back the cup? One reason, I suppose, is that the Khaya Majola Week features all thee formats of cricket: declaration games, T20s and 50-a-side limited overs.

That’s to let the players express themselves in different ways and it would be impossible to arrive at official finalists at the end of a mixed week like that.

Still, however they got there, and official or not, we have deserving finalists this year in Eastern Province and Western Province, and no-one who was here would argue that they don’t richly deserve to be in the big game today.

The scores from day 4 of the week are:

Western Province 243/5 (Daniel Smith 87, Lehan Botha 64, Guy Sheena 30*, Thembani Ngcizela 25*; Jack Lees 3/33); Gauteng 241 (Cameron Rowe 61, Heinrigh Pieterse 57, Nick Halstead-Cleak 39, Emmanuel Motswiri 32; Siya Plaatjie 4/29). Western Province won by two runs.

Eastern Province 239/8 (Nicholas Keevy 102*, Jade Smith 51, Tiaan van Vuuren 31; Merrick Brett 3/28, Zeeshan Ismail 3/48); Northerns 181 (Daniel van der Merwe 44*, Hanu Viljoen 38, Wasi Mushwana 33; Siphesihle Madlongolwana 3/20, Nicholas Keevy 3/49). Eastern Province won by 58 runs.

North West 215 (Van Zyl Smit 45, Jannie Claassens 44, Christopher de Freitas 35; Thulani Chiliza 4/16); KwaZulu-Natal 216/6 (Gareth Beavan 69, Jeremy Martins 57, Francis Moran 26; Julian Marais 1/16). KwaZulu-Natal won by four wickets.

KwaZulu-Natal Inland 146 (Jaques van der Walt 49, Michael Booth 25; Michael Kershaw 2/12, Lerato Nqoyi 2/18, Reeza Alexander 2/27); Free State 147/9 (Marco de Kock 85, Extras 22; Mondli Khumalo 5/35, Michael Booth 2/13). Free State won by one wicket.

Boland 244/6 (Ruan Terblanche 108*, Andrew Whaits 53, Ruben Senekal 44; Saahil Khan 2/35, Baadal Parag 2/47); Easterns 166 (Leander Lubbe 54, Neil Bothma 35; Gillad Oved 3/34, Juan Wilson 2/20, Anele Matya 2/39). Boland won by 78 runs.

Mpumalanga 169 (Zuan Swart 45, Lerato Mokoena 28; Heath Richards 4/19, Mesuli Vuba 3/17, Kevin de Kock 2/41); South Western Districts 131 (Tristan Reid 37; Akhulile Makatu 4/35, Anij Nagar 3/14, Zuan Swart 3/37). Mpumalanga won by 38 runs.

Namibia 138 (JC Balt 28, Extras 27; Tiaan Enslin 5/23, Prince Ngobeni 2/22); Limpopo 139/9 (Nhlamulo Mboweni 48*, Extras 29; Ettienne Beukes 3/31, Divan la Cock 2/20). Limpopo won by nine wickets.

Border 150 (Nonelela Yikha 68*; Michael Jantjies 3/33, Boitumelo Melesi 2/20, Orapeleng Mtlhoaring 2/24, Elrich Cloete 2/29); Northern Cape 151/5 (Orapeleng Mtlhoaring 42; Akhona Ratyana 2/23). Northern Cape won by five wickets.