The Makhanda Khaya Majola Week was as good as it gets

 

The first Khaya Majola Week I went to was in 1989. It was still the Nuffield Week back then and it was in Johannesburg. That was the first year that I was engaged as a freelance journalist – I was still a teacher then – and I was to cover every week, bar one or two, as a journalist until 2018 when the Saturday Star School Sport supplement was canned by the new owners of Independent Media.

By then, I’d become so much a part of proceedings that the organisers – more about them later – found a way to keep me coming.

I have to admit to an increasing level of grumpiness as I’ve grown older and I’ve, unkindly, been accused be of being cynical and complaining. I suppose I’d have to agree, to an extent, with that and that I went to Makhanda for the 2023 Khaya Majola Week with a less than fully positive attitude.

I got back home on Thursday cured, for now at least. I guess what I needed was to meet up with and mingle with people who make big sacrifices to provide opportunities for schoolboy cricketers to play the game, and to be engulfed in the spirit of generosity and the attention to detail that characterises the hospitality you get when these events are held in a small town.

And so it was in Makhanda. The tournament began with an official opening at which a guest speaker was to address the boys. A mistake, I thought. The players don’t want to hear what some self-important has-been has to say, they just want to play. But I was wrong, the speaker was Adi Birrell who has a coaching CV as long as your arm. He imparted some homespun Eastern Cape wisdom and his message was aimed straight at the players. It was spellbinding, and it set the tone for what was to come.

Graeme College – the Grahamstown school that isn’t St Andrew’s or Kingswood – was the venue and at that opening function I met Kevin Watson, the headmaster of Graeme, and Gregg van Molendorff, his deputy and the man in charge of the local organising committee. They were in our faces, in the nicest possible way, for the rest of the week.

Mr Watson is just remarkable. I’ve been to many of these sorts of things. But I’ve never seen the headmaster of the host school take ownership of the event the way he did. He was out there supervising the rolling of the wicket, painting the lines himself, and pulling the covers off – you don’t see that every day, but it went further. His mission seemed to be to make everyone feel at home and enjoying themselves. And at the closing dinner at the end of it, I watched him go around the room thanking everyone for their contribution. Even me, who really didn’t do that much.

He had a willing and able accomplice in Gregg van Molendorff. I’ve come across organisers of big events who pay attention to the details and make sure the proceedings run like clockwork. And I’ve seen others who are more people orientated and concentrate on relationships with the visitors. He was both, and then some. Indefatigable, always smiling and completely incapable of saying no to any request.

They were the locals. The CSA people were also there. Morgan Pillay, the tournament director for 28 years now, is simply the best sports administrator I’ve ever come across. Niels Momberg, for many years CSA’s manager of Youth and Tertiary Cricket, has been promoted to another role and in that one he is in charge of umpires and scorers, among other things. So, guess what? He used that as an excuse to spend the week in Makhanda anyway, and miss yet another birthday with his family.

Morgan’s birthday is the day before Neils’s, by the way, so he has also been away for it for close to 30 years now.

The men in charge set the tone and everyone else involved with running the event followed suit. At some tournaments and festivals it’s all about exclusion. Not everyone’s invited to the functions, you have to have the right accreditation to get into certain areas and they kick you out at closing time.

Not at this one. You got the idea that, of course you’re welcome – they made sure of that.

And then there was the setting. The schools of Grahamstown are pristine exceptions to the rule in a town that’s crumbling. The potholed roads have become famous, as have the wild donkeys roaming the streets.

There were matches at the clubs of the Farmers League in the surrounding areas. We took a drive to Salem, reportedly the oldest cricket field in the country. It was magical.

My colleague Hannes Nienaber and I had a beer in the pub there – he has a strong regard for the history and traditions of the game, and in that spirit, we also had to have a beer at the Rat and Parrot, the heart of university life in the town – although it was eerily quiet with the students not there.

It’s all about cricket and the players, of course, and I got the feeling that they were having a great time too. It showed in their play. There were some great performances and they can only have benefitted from playing on those fields, in those historic settings.

I wrote once before that if I was in charge the Khaya Majola Week will always be held in Potchefstroom. The fields are great and they are all close to each other, and the people there are just so nice. After the week gone by, I think we can alternate between Potch and Makhanda – it’s even better down there.

My top 10 school sports moments in 2023

 

I’ve been compiling these little end-of-the-year top 10 highlights lists since about 2009 when the Saturday Star began running a school sport supplement. At first it was a way to fill a page during the “silly season” in December – when there had to be a newspaper, but there was no real news to fill it.

I got to enjoy doing it and there were those who enjoyed reading it, it seems, so I kept it going on this platform after School Sport was closed down. From the beginning I made it a rule that I would only include games and events that I had actually attended, or watched on TV, at the least. That became more challenging when I stopped working and there were no longer sponsored trips to weeks and tournaments and I began to rely on the rare televised schools games and the bigger interprovincial competitions that did get aired.

And then, along came SuperSport Schools. It’s been a game-changer for me and my trivial list year can include, as you’ll see, references to the School Boat Race, and the SA Schools Water Polo Champs, and I can say I was there – via my laptop and an HDMI cable.

1 So, highlight number one in 2023 was the growth in depth and quality of the SuperSport Schools coverage. I was able to watch the biggest rugby derbies, the interprovincial hockey and rugby weeks, the Boat Race and the SA Schools Water Polo tournament, while never leaving my couch. Who could have imagined?

2 The St Benedict’s rowing and Northcliff athletics records are still stuck, although there may have been a slight shift this year. Northcliff duly won the Joburg co-ed schools athletics interhigh for the 25^th year in a row, but they squeaked home by just 4 points over Rand Park. A disqualification here, or a dropped relay baton there, and the unbeaten run would have been history! Bennies were comfortable winners of the SA Schools Rowing Championships for the 29th consecutive year and they aren’t going anywhere. They also won the schools boat race for the sixth year in a row.

3 The St Stithians Girls water polo team were unbeaten in 60 games during the 2022/2023 season, That includes winning six national tournaments, including the big ones – the St Peter’s, Reef Cup and their own Saints Invitational.

4 It was quite a sporting year for the St Stithians family of schools. Their boys 1^st hockey team won the Aitken Cup – ending Jeppe’s streak – and their girls won the Pullen Trophy. That’s the first time that’s happened, and then they had four players selected for the SA U19 cricket team: Esosa Aihevba, Lhuan-Dre Pretorius, Richard Seletswane and Kwena Maphaka.

5 Speaking of dominant schools, there’s SACS hockey. Their 1^st team was unbeaten and ended the year as the number one ranked team. There were 11 SACS players in the WP team that won the U18 Interprovinicial Tournament. Six of them made the SA Schools team and a further four were in the SA U16 side.

6 The big schools rugby derby clashes are another perennial highlight for me. Thanks to SuperSport Schools I was able to see the Midlands derby between Michaelhouse and Hilton, K Day in Grahamstown, and the Paarl Interschools extravaganza. But the one I attended was the KES vs Jeppe double header – possibly the second biggest of them all. They were thrillers, played in front of capacity crowds and the honours were split, one win each.

7 A few weeks later we had the Rugby Youth Weeks, The U19 Academy Week was in Joburg and The Golden Lions beat Western Province in the “main game”, which wasn’t that surprising seeing that there were four or five players in the Lions side who certainly should have been at the Craven Week instead. The Jeppe/KES midfield combination was great to watch and how those players were not considered good enough for the A team can only be attributed to one-eyed selections. Instead, the selectors opted for a two-school strategy – Monument and Helpmekaar – which didn’t work: the Craven side lost two out of their three matches.  

8 and 9 – a couple of outstanding individuals, Jeppe’s Jaydon Brooker and David Teeger of King Edward. Brooker achieved a rare double, selection for both the Southern Gauteng U18 hockey team, and the Central Gauteng Lions cricket team. He was player of the tournament at the hockey interprovincial and made the SA Schools and U19 teams, Unfortunately, he has had to miss the Khaya Majola Week because he is away with the National U21 hockey team at the Junior World Cup in Kuala Lampur.

The David Teeger story is a remarkable one. He is the captain of the Central Gauteng Lions, and the SA U19 teams, although the latter almost got derailed after Cricket South Africa launched an inquiry into a pro-Israel comment he made when accepting an award. Luckily, sanity prevailed in that and he will lead the SA team at the U19 World Cup in January. The big Teeger story of the year, however, was when his KES teammates turned up at his house early one Saturday morning to walk to school with him. He comes from an Orthodox Jewish family and he chooses not to ride in a car on the Sabbath. So, he walks to school for home games and stays in a B&B on Friday night for away ones. That kind of commitment has to be admired – and it shows in his cricket.

10 The year ended with the SA Schools Water Polo tournament in Gqberha. It’s a massive event, played from U12 to U19, boys and girls. I don’t really approve of the scale of it, I don’t think provincial colours should be handed out so liberally. For me the two U19 finals are what it’s really all about, and they were thrillers. Central Gauteng won the girls game by two goals over Western Province  and WP won the boys – in a penalty shootout after they equalised with five second to go against Gauteng. It was edge-of-the-seat stuff.

11 Here’s an 11^th, just because I can. Back in May when Jeppe hosted Affies, they couldn’t field as many sides as the Pretoria powerhouse, so they asked Springs Boys’ High to fill in the gaps. The Springs 1^st team played Affies 3rds. Affies won, although I can’t remember the score, and afterwards the two teams posed, arm in arm, for a photo. An unlikely meeting between schools who exists in different dimensions, and a moving occasion.

Gauteng schools water polo - massive.

 

I was at the Gauteng Schools Water Polo capping ceremony at St Peter’s on Tuesday night, and it was quite amazing. The province is sending 22 teams to the Interprovincial tournament in Gqeberha this weekend. That’s 304 players, 40 coaches, 12 managers and seven referees.

I can’t think of many touring contingents that big, and they were all presented with certificates and scrolls on Tuesday. The ceremony was held in the air-conditioned indoor basketball facility at St Peter’s  – which made the two and a half hours it took bearable, given the heat we’ve been having in Joburg this past week. They’ve done it before, obviously, it ran like clockwork, every player got his or her moment in the spotlight and tribute was paid to some special individuals, in an appropriate manner.

All very impressive and very different to the days when I used organise these evenings. We only had two, later three, teams back then and we’d have a braai for the boys and their parents (no girls polo back then) and get someone like Hennie van Niekerk or Billy Otto to do the hand-shaking. It’s come a long way.

I’ve been critical about them letting it get so big. I’ve always felt provincial competition is an elite, not a mass participation event, and handing certificates to over 300 players is not elite. On the other hand, though, I agree that its wonderful to have that many teenagers actively engaged in healthy sport, among their friends at this time of the year – they could be doing far less positive things with their time. Water polo is a better game than most when it comes to a vehicle for teaching values and life skills. And I applaud the sacrifices made by so many teachers, coaches and administrators to make it possible.

Pros and cons to both arguments, I guess.

Where I do have some strong views is when it comes to the age at which children should be introduced to serious competitive sport. There are under-12 and under-13 categories at SA Schools polo these days, That’s 11 and 12 year-olds! Should they be introduced to the joys and heartaches of team selection, the arduous training that is part of the game, and the seriousness of a professional tournament at that age? Shouldn’t they rather be learning the basics through game situations that focus on the fun of it, with no scores being kept?

Still, seeing all those shiny smiling faces, and that array of school uniforms, on Tuesday night warmed my heart. The organisers pledged, at the ceremony, to make every step they take educationally accountable and that player safety is their priority. You can only applaud that.

 

Three festivals in one, not easy but a real highlight

 My sporting highlight of the weekend just gone by? ……… Well, the World Cup final, obviously, but apart from that, it’s got to be the four days I spent at St David’s covering their three simultaneous sports festivals, basketball, cricket and water polo.

It was the independent schools’ half term break – a custom those schools have of giving everyone a weekend off in the middle of all their frantic activity. And then, in true teacher-style, they fill it with even more frantic activity and make those running it work even harder in their break than during their time on duty.

They do it for the kids, of course, although there’s a marketing spin-off for the school, I guess. There certainly should be. It takes considerable organisational prowess to have all those games played on time, particularly at this time of the year when the weather is always a factor. And there is plenty of hard work going on behind the scenes, I sat in the media office and saw a fair part of it.

The real stars were outside though, the coaches, the referees and the boys.

Randomly, some highlights making the whole thing a highlight, included:

The ongoing Michael Mount basketball success story. The Montessori school made both finals of the Inanda Hoops tournament, their under-15s won it and their under-18s came close. The Dubravka Lunnemann legend continues. She’s an ex-parent who originally hails from Serbia who got the school on the basketball map and although she’s older now and takes a bit of a back seat, she was there with the teams at their games and I watched how the players gave her their absolute attention whenever she had something to say to them.

Putting under-12 water polo players into an international size water polo pool and telling them to swim. It’s a long way from goal to goal in a pool like that, and they are little guys. I just loved watching the effort they put in. They are going to be far better at the game for the experience they got this weekend.

The ongoing innovative thinking of Dave Nosworthy. The St David’s director of cricket has coached the game at very high levels, yet there he was, designing a T10 tournament aimed at giving 10 and 11 year-olds a fun-filled, action-packed weekend. The idea was that they should fall in love with the game and make it their choice as they get older. It was in stark contrast to his other innovation – the two-day festival for U18s, aimed at slowing it down and mastering the art of playing cricket over long periods of time.

The kids who spent the long weekend at St David’s all came away a little better at what they do – that's a real highlight to me.

Innovation is the long and short of it at St David's cricket festivals

 

I was going on the other day about the role of tradition in ongoing excellence in schools, and that it’s OK to sometimes bring in new things. Innovation is the opposite of tradition in a way, and there’s nothing wrong with it, as long as it’s in the service of the educational role of sport as a school activity.

So, while the big Inanda Hoops basketball tournament at St David’s this weekend (and I know there are other schools tournaments around the country too), is far removed from traditional school sport, and a bit weird to my conservative way of thinking, it’s a great innovation because it exposes a couple of hundred boys at a time to all sorts of new opportunities to learn sporting and life lessons.

Then, on day two of the Inanda Hoops, the St David’s prep school cricket festival kicked off. And it’s pretty innovative too. It’s for players who will still be at primary school next year, the teams wear brightly coloured shirts and have been given colourful names along the lines of the IPL teams – St David’s Dynamite, Montrose Meteors, St Stithians Supermen etc. And they are playing 10 overs-a-side matches, three in a day.

It’s all the idea of Dave Nosworthy, director of cricket at St David’s, the same man who turned traditional 1^st team festivals on their head by doing away with the usual variety of formats over four days and saying, we’ll play two two-day games at our four day event instead.

I bumped into him at St David’s on Saturday and asked him about the contrast between their two festivals – the longest format in schools cricket at one, and the shortest at the other.

I liked his reply because his reasons are grounded in educational principles and the development of the boys is at the heart of them. They are about boys at opposite ends of their school cricket lives, he told me. The U19 players at the two-day Fasken tournament are about to enter the senior ranks and they need to learn how to play multi-day games where you can build an innings, bowlers have longer spells and fielders are on their feet all day, he explained.

“This prep schools tournament is at the other end,” he said. “We want these boys to become hooked on the game, if they are going to give up a weekend they must be having fun, so the games are short and sharp, the boundaries are brought in, meaning there a plenty of runs, and they play lots of games each day. And we have introduced local rules that are aimed at full participation for every player.”

The growth of cricket is the aim, he explained, and the game is in trouble at primary schools. “Cricket isn’t being played in the third term very much anymore, with the Grade 7s being prepared for high school sports like rowing. rugby, water polo, basketball etc instead,” Nosworthy said. “We want to remind them that cricket is still a wonderful game.”

It is that, and the boys in action at St David’s this weekend are having a wonderful time, you can see it in their faces.

All sorts of lessons learnt by departing from tradition

 

An adherence to tradition, I’ve found, is one of the things that all the good schools have in common. It’s what links the present with the past and keeps the legacy alive. Current learners are told, forced sometimes, to do things the exact way that they’ve always been done and that’s how the values and expectations are passed along. It’s unlikely that long-term, sustained success can happen in the absence of tradition.

That doesn’t mean, though, that things must never change, or that change is necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve been reminded of that this weekend, attending the three festivals being hosted concurrently at St David’s Marist Inanda. These sorts of events have become a feature of the school. They already host major national tournaments in cricket and football and now, during their half-term break, they run the Inanda Hoops basketball tournament which is fast becoming a major “stayers” competition, and as if the place isn’t hectic enough, there is an under-14 water polo tournament on at the same time, and a primary school T10 cricket tournament too.

 So, why did it get me thinking about the role of tradition? It’s the basketball, mainly. I don’t recall reporting on the sport too much in my days at the Saturday Star, and I only left there in 2016. Yet, now we have a tournament like this one. The scale of it, the level of organisation, and the facilities: it’s being played on four courts, the main one an arena capable of hosting games at the highest level. And it’s all accompanied by loud music, with a DJ getting the crowds hyped up.

It flies in the face of tradition. Not so long ago, many schools were dubious about the game, some even refused to offer it. The TV images of street basketball in the States, with its gangster culture scared them off. Even the professional game, as we see it on TV, has players that cannot be called good role models and practices that are hardly educational.

But, school demographics have changed, a new generation of boys and their parents want to play the game and the schools have had to change. It was confirmed to me that change is not always bad when I observed the teams in action at St David’s. Sport at school has to be an educational activity, no argument, if you cannot justify everything that is happening educationally, then it shouldn’t be happening.

And I saw all sorts of lessons being taught and learnt at the Inanda Hoops, in the midst of all that noise and apparent chaos. Take the mix of schools involved, for instance. The top independent schools were there, but so was a team from Soweto, and the local state schools too. That creates opportunities for boys to mingle with and play against people they usually won’t come into contact with. I watched Hilton College play against the King’s School, Linbro Park, and Jeppe play the Soweto Academy. All of those players went home that night knowing a little more that they did when they arrived in the morning.

Some of the coaches seemed to get a little over excited, and there were some hairstyles that wouldn’t be allowed at some schools, but the behaviour of the players was impressive. The lessons of teamwork, discipline, sportsmanship and all-out effort are being taught under some difficult circumstances, and we all know that’s when the best lessons are learnt.

Sure, it’s noisy, some of the kids dress funny and a 60 minute game can easily last two hours sometimes, but going against tradition and allowing the game in has opened up all sorts of educational possibilities.

And St David’s have compressed all of those into a manic four days, and provided a structure for it all, amazingly, to run with precision. 

It’s been wonderful to see.

 

Proper football development - two types, one field

 

Two of my favourite school sports events took place within a week of each other. The 6^th annual Kensington Community Cup soccer tournament was played last Wednesday, and this week, the U15 Iqhawe rugby week is on.

Nothing strange about that – it’s a calendar thing – but, this time, they both happened on the same field: Collard, the main rugby field at Jeppe High School for Boys. Jeppe organises the Kensington Community Cup, a tournament involving teams from the immediate area around the school; while the Iqhawe Week is an SA Rugby Youth Week, run by the SA Rugby Legends organisation, and this is the second year in a row that Jeppe has hosted the teams, although last year the games were played at the Johannesburg Stadium.

The idea with the Community Cup is to arrange a series of games for the local schools – who hardly ever meet each other - and to include a Jeppe team that never plays against those schools, even though they are all within a 5km radius of each other. Sponsors are found to give the players a good meal and each team goes home with a fancy bag filled with new footballs, as well as a set of training bibs and some cones.

 I wasn’t happy to hear that this year it was played as a tournament, with a final, and that individual prizes were awarded – in the past it was festival, with no points awarded and no individuals singled out. I completely miscalculated what a big deal it all was for those teams and players, and the spectators they brought with them. The winners of the final, Jules High, were over the moon and the losers, Kensington Secondary, were devastated. The boys named as the best players on the day were so excited and their supporters overjoyed. It was something to see.

Sadly, that’s about as good as it gets for those players – unless the best of them gets spotted somehow and gets into the youth academy of one of the professional clubs. There really isn’t much organised sport at those schools and SAFA has never done much in terms of broad-based grassroots development (and then they wonder why other African countries, where the professional game is way behind where ours is, but where there are national development programmes, beat us in continental competitions).

The situation is a bit better with rugby, although the challenges there are greater. There is pressure from all sides to make the game demographically representative – code for less white – at the top levels, and we all know that achieving that is a numbers game: to get more elite black players you need more black players at the grassroots level.

Yet, those masses of potential players are at the same dysfunctional schools that the soccer players are at, and it's way more complex to get rugby going from scratch. The rugby authorities are fortunate in that the organisation of rugby at school level in SA is arguably the best in the world. They have used that in their quest for transformation by encouraging the established schools to bring in talented black players through bursaries and, as a result, there are plenty of black players in the top 1^st teams around the country and many of them go to the SA Rugby Youth Weeks. It means that the compulsory race quotas in those teams are met, but it is increasingly going much further than that, and in most years, the best players at the Craven Week are black.

It’s not entirely honest, those elite black players aren’t coming from any sort of grassroots programme, and the number of township and rural schools playing rugby isn’t increasing, but it’s a model that’s working – the black stars shining for the Springboks at the World Cup this month almost all went to the top rugby schools in the country.

Football isn’t emulating it in any way. It’s simply not true to say that the private and former Model C schools don’t have football programmes, it hasn’t been true for many years. There are high quality, mass participation development systems at many of them, and fiercely competitive, well organised competitions. Last weekend Grey College (SA’s undisputed top rugby school, by the way), held its 18^th Nedbank Soccer tournament. The majority of players in action there were black, as they are at all of the half a dozen or so similar tournaments held during the short, intense schools football season that takes place at this time of the year.

SAFA is simply not interested, they still pretend the game doesn’t exist at those schools and no attempt is being made to make their programmes part of the player development pathway, the way that rugby does.

What I like about the Iqhawe Week is that it is aimed at keeping rugby alive in places where it is in trouble. The SA Rugby Legends Association -all ex-Springboks – runs a programme called Vuka that organises leagues and playing opportunities for boys and girls who are not at established rugby schools. They help out with equipment and coaching too. From there they have a regional competition, and an interprovincial week – the Iqhawe Week. The provinces send U15 teams to it, with the proviso that players from their established schools must not be picked.

The Golden Lions union – where there are many schools with rugby field and posts, at least - decided that their team will come from schools who field four teams or less in inter-school matches. In addition to that, they run a Vuka programme in the townships, with about 29 schools involved. The problem there, according to Tim Goodwin of the Lions Union, is that they don’t play enough quality matches in their season. That’s an area where the established schools can help. I overheard the Jeppe people talking about getting teams from there to fill in the gaps in their fixtures. I won’t be surprised if that were to happen – that sort of thing is in Jeppe’s DNA.

I’m on record that I disapprove of player recruitment. The Iqhawe Week is an exception. From the start, the idea was that some of these players should be taken up by the established schools. I saw scouts from quite a number of established schools at Jeppe this week – you could recognise them by the chequebooks sticking out of their back pockets. While you can’t justify taking a player who is already a star away from a school that has a functioning rugby programme by saying it’s in his best interests; giving a player who shows potential, but is unlikely to realise it where he is, a chance at an established centre of excellence is a different matter. There were, I’m told, 22 players who were granted bursaries by top schools at last year’s week.

And they are choosing a team this year that will play in the U16 Khomo Week next year. The scouts will be watching them too, I’d wager.

Two highlights of the week for me – in the same place