How you make people feel is what counts

I can’t find it now, but I read a tweet the other day from one of the “philosopher coaches” that I follow on Twitter that paraphrased a Maya Angelou quote:

““People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The tweeter was saying that those you coached won’t remember wins and losses, they’ll remember the impact you as a coach made in their lives.

I was prompted to look it up after attending the memorial service for Norman McFarland at St John’s College earlier this week.

McFarland, who passed away at the age of 79 was a highly successful school rugby coach, first at King Edward VII school, and later at other schools and clubs. There would have been many factors that led to his success, but the one that stood out was his innovation. He reinvented the game, and he did it because, those days, you coached the material that you were presented – no shopping to fill gaps – and he made up for deficiencies in size and natural ability by out-thinking his opponents.

So, famously, his teams employed three-man scrums and two-man lineouts, negating the size disadvantage that they were at, and they beat teams that were clearly physically superior to them. There is a story, retold at the memorial service, that the International Rugby Board actually changed the laws of the game because of his tactics. I suspect that that’s apocryphal, but I was a Union referee those days and I do recall that we would spend a lot of time at our monthly law discussion meetings trying to figure out what was legal and what wasn’t and how to referee his teams.

Eventually those practices were outlawed, as part of wider law changes made in the name of player safety, but by then Norman had already moved on and was developing other new ways to get an edge, usually with success.

The family tributes at the service were deeply moving, but there were two eulogies by non-family members that said, to me, that Norman McFarland was the kind of coach and person that Maya Angelou was talking about.

One was by a star rugby player, a member of one of the most successful teams the school ever had. He never spoke about that at all. Instead, he remembered that, when he was skinny little kid in the prep school, Norman spoke to him. He knew his name, and he was pleased to hear that he would be coming to the high school the next year.

The other wasn’t sporting at all. He remembered how, as a junior at the school, he tried out for basketball, but had no interest or ability and sat on the bench most of the time. McFarland, the coach, spotted him and engaged him in a conversation on books and reading – an area that he did have a passion for. It was, the speaker said, an extraordinary perceptive action.

I met Norman in 1978 when I started coaching rugby at a rival school. He was a fearsome opponent and our teams simply never beat his. I moved on to other things and somehow my path crossed his every now and then. What I remember was that he was always friendly and very often kind to me.

He was a jogger, everyone knows that, and he used to pound the streets around St John’s College where he worked. I lived in nearby Bellevue East and for a time I also ran around the suburbs. We’d meet quite often on the sidewalks and he’d say thing like: “you are looking strong today” and “I can see that weight falling off you.” I was running to try to slim down, so you can imagine how that made me feel.

And when I became a journalist and went on a bit of a crusade against uneducational and dishonest practices in school sport he would tell me, whenever I saw him, that he agreed with something I wrote and he congratulated me. Again, imagine how I felt.

That’s what I’ll remember about Norman McFarland. He was the doyen of rugby coaches, I read and still have his book on it, and I watched his teams play breath-taking rugby. But like those I listened to last Tuesday, it’s the way he made me feel that made the deepest impact.

Good men, not good players. That's what it's really all about

I, like many I guess, didn’t know why the running out of Jos Buttler at the bowler's end by Ravi Ashwin in the Indian Premier League recently is called a “mankad”.

So, I Googled it, and found out that this type of dismissal was named after Indian bowler Vinoo Mankad, who dismissed Australia’s Bill Brown in this fashion during the second Test in Sydney in 1947. It was the second time he got Brown out in that way on that tour and it caused a mighty uproar. The name stuck after that.

I’d never heard the term before, although I have come across incidents where backing up batsmen have been warned by the bowler and I always thought the laws of the game required that to happen before the batsman could be dismissed in this way.

It turns out that there’s nothing in the laws, or in the MCC guidance notes on the Spirit of Cricket, saying that there has to be a warning, so the dismissal in he IPL was perfectly legal and that’s the end of it.

It’s not really the end of it though, is it? Cricket, in particular, is a game that teaches life lessons all over the place, that’s why it’s such a good sport to play in schools.

The expression “it’s just not cricket” is what that’s all about and although it may be an old fashioned concept with a bit of a paternalistic, colonial tint to it, the principle behind it is not.

It means just what the mankad debate is all about – sometimes the right thing to do is not in the laws, but it is the right thing to do. If you don’t do it it’s, well, just not cricket.

Cricket’s a good game for teaching values to school sportsmen and women, but any game will do the same, it all depends on the way it’s coached and managed.

I firmly believe that the real reason we include sport in the school curriculum is to develop the young people involved into good human beings who can go out into the world one day and make a positive contribution.

It may be that they do that as professional players, but that’s incidental, that’s not the reason why we run sporting programmes at schools.

Any teacher or coach responsible for the running of a school sport programme who doesn’t have in mind that the most important task is to teach children to behave honourably and according to the values and ethics that are included in the ephemeral “spirit of the game” is not, in my opinion, doing his or her job.

And a cricket coach who teaches a bowler to mankad a batsman, or for that matter, tells a batsman that it’s OK to steal a yard backing up because there’s no chance that he will be mankaded, should be fired.

Let’s send young people out into the world who do good because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s just not cricket to do otherwise.

Can I add an example from the weekend past that, for me illustrates what I’m talking about?

I was sent a copy of an e-mail to the principal of a school congratulating his boys on their behaviour at an airport on their way back from one of the weekend rugby festivals. I won’t say which school but the name wouldn’t surprise anyone who, like me, spends a lot of time among schoolboys in Joburg.

The boys, just hours after what must have been a devastating, narrow defeat that afternoon, sprung to the assistance of two different mothers struggling with babies, prams and bulky luggage, in the wind, and cheerfully saw them on and off the plane and onto the airport bus.

No real losers in that team – they have been taught, and they have learnt, the more important lessons that, in this case, rugby is meant to teach.

Danone competition offers some light in soccer's darkness

In the days when my job forced me to listen to what people like him had to say, I recall hearing Dennis Mumble, the CEO of SAFA, tell audiences more than once that one of the problems with South African football was that the “white” schools play rugby and won’t let their boys play soccer.

By “white” he was referring to the former model C and private schools where, we all know, the majority of pupils are black, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that he was lying, and he knew he was.

I can say that because I saw him, on more than one occasion, at tournaments and matches involving those sorts of schools and where the white players on the fields were certainly in the minority. Where he was correct is that the rugby-playing schools don’t generally enter the SA Schools Football Association’s tournaments in the various age groups. Those competitions run throughout the year and will disrupt other sporting programmes. Why is that a problem necessarily? They will tell you that they want their boys to be involved with a range of activities, in summer and winter, and soccer season runs from August to October.

Only three months? True. But in that time the soccer teams at Joburg’s boys schools play roughly twice as many matches than their rugby teams do in their five-month season. And they are proper games, on good fields, in proper kit, well-refereed etc. In short, the soccer players benefit from the advantaged positions that those well-resourced schools hold.

It isn’t fair, but it’s not the reason why Bafana Bafana struggle the way they do. In fact, good leadership should surely be able to find a way to turn the quality that exists in that system to the advantage of soccer as a whole.

Instead, like Mr Mumble, they choose to pretend it doesn’t exist.

There is, however, a chink of light. It’s at primary school level where for the third year now schools from the Johannesburg Primary Schools Football Association -the body that runs the game at the former model C and private schools - are playing in the under-12 Danone Nations Cup competition.

The primary schools play soccer in the second term, of course, so timing’s not a problem. And importantly, the organisers have bent the existing model a bit to accommodate them. They have their own regional playoff system, which they have woven into their traditional-fixtures way of doing things and a slot has been created at the Gauteng provincial finals of the competition for the team that comes through.

Not all the Joburg schools enter – it takes a bit longer for all minds to shift – but the numbers are increasing and all the signs are positive.

No team from that side of the draw has made it through to the competition’s national finals yet. Perhaps they aren’t as good as they thought they were after all, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that a significant barrier has been breached and, for the kids involved, new things have been experienced and new acquaintances made. And it’s good for the game.

That’s what sport, and education, is supposed to be about, and those on both sides of this particular issue need to make more of it happen.

School rugby's slash and burn culture

The schools rugby season hasn’t started yet – although there could well be some sort of “super” 8,12,16 or whatever, competition somewhere where the boys are already playing games – but the debate is up and running, and it’s not about the good things that the game brings to education.

No, it’s all negative and there are two camps: those who believe that the professionalisation of the game at school level is a good thing and that the standard of play evident at the top schools, and the quality of the players emerging from them, excuses the methods used to get to that level; and those who say it’s daft on all sorts of levels.

No prizes for guessing which side of the fence I’m sitting on.

Among the many articles written on the issues is this one by Mark Keohane:

https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/sport/schoolboy-rugby-corrupting-the-game-by-selling-its-soul-19086344

He refers to the report on the inquiry into school rugby coming out of New Zealand:

http://files.allblacks.com/community-rugby/NZR-Secondary-School-Report-Executive-Summary.pdf

The articles remind us that things are not healthy, and that the problem is not restricted to just us. It’s what I and others have been going on about for years now. And at heart what we are saying is that while it may be right to begin preparing the next generation of professional players early, that process should not have anything to do with school rugby.

Sure, the schools are where the best coaches, the facilities and the high levels of competition are found, but that’s not a good thing. It’s selling the soul of the game, as Keohane points out. Worse, there is little educational integrity left in what is happening around school rugby. And if there is one thing that’s not debatable it’s that everything that happens in a school has to be educationally accountable in the end.

South Africa won’t remain in the top tier of international rugby if we don’t keep the pipeline of talented young players flowing, no-one’s denying that, what I’m saying is that it isn’t the job of the schools to do that. We also have the unique imperative of having to increase the number of black players at the top levels and, while schools should be, and are, doing that, those running the game can’t outsource that responsibility and wash their hands of it.

I have confessed to conflicting interests in all of this. I’m a lover of schoolboy rugby, of both types. I love going to the Easter rugby festivals to watch some of the “top 10” teams play, and I go to the Craven Week every year and I’m always astounded at the quality of the teams and by the talent on show.

But I also love hearing that when King Edward play Maritzburg College, for example, that there will be 23 rugby matches on the day, and I enjoyed going to King David Victory Park, for example, on a Wednesday to see them play a 12 a-side game against Saheti (reduced in numbers because of the BokSmart regulations which, in that case, didn’t do the game much good); and I especially enjoyed watching Roosevelt play Greenside – in a game with 15 black players in each team, refereed by a white woman – and hearing the players respectfully call her ma’am and abide by all her decisions without question.

You cannot argue that both types of school rugby aren’t important and valuable. If only they could both continue to thrive, side, by side. But they can’t, and they don’t anymore. The elite, professional side of the game is murdering the other one and the killers, with blood on their hands, are those who believe that winning 1^st team rugby games is the primary measure of success for a school and that school rugby is where the preparation of players for the professional game should take place. Those who support what’s going on, or condone the practices adopted to make these things happen are also culpable.

The unsavoury practices that take place have been listed often enough. The one getting most attention right now is recruitment of players. That’s the big one – if you strip the other schools of their talent so that your team can be stronger you are encouraging them to give up and you are creating a small pool of super schools that no-one else is good enough to play against. If you can’t see why that’s bad then you aren’t paying attention.

Then there’s doping. The six 2018 Craven Week players bust for steroids is, by definition, just the tip of the ice berg. Don’t kid yourselves that all of the muscular giants we see every Saturday morning are clean.

Funding in some schools (and its source is irrelevant) is being used in eye-watering proportions to pay for elite rugby programmes. It’s being used to pay for bursaries, gymnasiums, coaches, professional support staff, all aimed at victory for the first team squad – 30 odd-boys in schools with 1 000 pupils typically – where’s the educational accountability in that?

It’s slash and burn agriculture. A few schools can brag about their top 10 finishes in the rankings and they may in the years to come see a handful of their ex-pupils make provincial teams, or even the Springboks, but they are leaving a desert around them.

That fun, mass participation, part of the game is disappearing, those smaller schools who pay low-key Wednesday rugby are opting for other sports and the majority of players in all the schools are simply not enjoying it anymore. Fewer and fewer of them carry on playing after school.

That’s what Keo, and the New Zealand report, mean when they say that the professionalisation of rugby at school level is killing the game. And because everyone knows that it’s happening, it really is murder.

Just stop it!

I see that Danny Jones, head of amateur rugby at Western Province has been asked to intervene in the Paarl Boys’ High matter which has seen Wynberg Boys’ High and SACS both vow to have nothing to do with the Paarl School as a result of it’s poaching some of their rugby players.

That indicates that it’s being taken pretty seriously by the union down there, but one wonders what they are able to do about it.

The Zondo commission on state capture is on as I write this and what’s emerged out of the swill trough that it’s exposing is that only a truly independent investigating authority, with the power to arrest people and put them on trial is capable of putting a stop corruption. That, or those in power just must not do it anymore!

Maybe we need something similar when it comes to the scourge of schoolboy rugby recruitment. It’s a lower key issue, I know, but the same questions are being posed here as those asked about state corruption. Can it be stopped, and if it can, who is going to stop it?

I don’t have the solution, but I know that Danny Jones isn’t the answer. That’s a bit like former president Zuma’s internal investigation into the renovations at Nkandla. Western Province Rugby, remember, are the ones who allow unquestioned, Paarl Boys’ High and the other Boland rugby schools to stay part of Western Province in the first place. And given the union’s pride in their continued status as the undisputed kings of school rugby, I’d be very surprised if they weren’t in some way involved in the recruitment practices of those self-same WP/Boland schools.

It’s like asking the Golden Lions to intervene in a dispute between a Joburg boys’ school and the co-ed school that has lost a player to them on a bursary – everyone knows that the union condones, if not openly encourages, getting the best players into the “best” schools.

No, some one else has to take a hand it. But, I’m afraid we are a long way from that. In the first instance, we have to agree that trading in children between the ages of 13 and 18 is wrong. Some, incredibly, believe that when the reasons behind the practice have to do with the development of good rugby players and the maintenance of school winning records, it’s OK.

Then there’s the matter of authority. Who is actually in charge of a schoolboy (other than his parents, of course)? Well, it’s not the local rugby union.

There is legislation - The South African Schools Act of 1996 - and the SA Council for Educators covers it in its code of ethics, and there is the common law principle of in loco parentis. According to the latter, the parents delegate the authority to care for their children in their absence to the school, which translates into the school principal having the responsibility to make decisions (pastoral and educational) on their behalf and he/she, in return can be held liable for any harm done to the children in their care.

This stand-in responsibility cannot be shirked, any more than the legal and codified requirements can be ignored. As the leader of the school the principal has to make decisions that are in the best interests of the child. No-one else can be given that authority.

He or she also sets the direction for the entire school. If they believe the principle of luring talented players to other schools is wrong – and you cannot argue that being “bought” on the basis of rugby ability has no effect on a child – then they have the authority and the duty to put a stop to the practice.
 

Sure, the parents will claim that no offers were made. Paarl Boy’s High’s reply to Wynberg includes a statement from the parents insisting that it was entirely their son’s own decision and they were never approached by the school.

Maybe that’s true – I have no way of proving otherwise – but it’s a common response in these sorts of cases, and in all of them the child in question is a potential A team rugby (or other high-profile sport) player and it’s in the financial interests of the parents to go along with it.

Unlike with state capture, where no remedy seems to be in sight, there is a solution here. Just stop it! Don’t accept kids into your school who are coming to help your teams to win. Don’t go looking for players elsewhere. Stop lying about it; don’t be a hypocrite; and stop playing against any school that persists with the practice.

Then let it settle down and get on with your duty to advance transformation and give opportunities to those who are genuinely in need.

The real reasons why schools are raiding the Eastern Cape

My colleague at SARugbymag.co.za, Dylan Jack, opened the school rugby recruitment can of worms nice and early this year with this article on the luring of talent from Dale and Queens Colleges to, presumably, the elite schools of the KZN Midlands and Durban.

https://www.sarugbymag.co.za/natal-schools-accused-of-player-poaching/

It got quite a bit of attention, including 114 shares, so far, of the Facebook link to it, and 131 comments. And many of those who commented believe there is nothing wrong with the practice and they wonder, some of them quite rudely, what Dylan is on about.

Those who think the “buying” of players – black African boys, mainly from disadvantaged homes in this case – is a good thing cite the reasons you often hear. It’s offering the players a better future via an education at a good school, and a chance to develop as rugby players through good coaching and competition. They will get recognition at those schools and it may lead to a future as a professional player for them.

All of which might very well happen, of course, although there are some alarming cases in which that promise of a brighter future goes up in smoke when the talented youngster doesn’t develop as expected, or is injured, or simply doesn’t fit in with his fabulous new surroundings. It’s often a ticket back to the rural Eastern Cape for him then.

Many do become great players and go on to play at the highest levels and there are schools that do commit themselves to the holistic development of all their pupils and who will keep the boy on even if he flops as a player. So, you can’t condemn the process out of hand – it’s an ill-wind that blows nobody any good – but we are kidding ourselves if we believe that the raiding of the schools, like Dale and Queens, located in the parts of the country where rugby is traditionally the sport of choice among black children is being done purely for philanthropic reasons.

No. There are two things behind it: wins for the first teams of schools and the rankings that go with that and the enforced compliance with race-based quotas in representative teams at school and senior levels. And those quotas are increasingly going to distinguish between black African players specifically and generic players of colour in the future.

As a result, schools on the hunt send their scouts to the festivals and to the under-13 and under-16 provincial weeks, on the lookout for talented players who are going to win games for them in time to come. They have the support, financial and technical, of the provincial unions who know they have to select Craven Week teams according to an ever-increasing quota, and that the pressure is on from SA Rugby to field black African players in their senior teams. It’s easier to look for ready-made rugby players in the places where they already exist than to create a development progamme and nurture them there.

That’s why the talented players at Dale and Queens are being targeted and those who engage in the practice should own up to it and not hide behind noble-sounding talk of offering opportunities to those in need.

Anyone who is able to offer those opportunities should be doing so, of course, but rugby talent shouldn’t be the main, or only, criteria for deciding who is given the chance.

If serving rugby is what you have at heart, why not leave the youngsters at schools like Dale and Queens where they are getting good coaching, and games, and spread your net to take in the many talented kids who don’t have any access to the game?

A really disturbing point made in Dylan Jack’s article is that the predator schools have become very good at getting to the parents of the boys they want, making them financial offers they can’t refuse. Not much ethical behaviour and educational principle at work there.

It’s a dishonourable business and the dishonour overshadows the good that is being done in the process. Those who have power to put an end to it are the headmasters of the schools involved. They have the authority, and they should have the morality to see it for what it really is – and end it, as early as right now!

Stop playing against the buyers of players

The decision taken by 10 Auckland, New Zealand, principals to stop playing against a school that has been aggressively recruiting established 1^st team rugby players, as reported in the New Zealand Herald

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12171645&ref=twitter

has caused a bit of a flutter.

It’s not an original story, of course, and the movement of high performing players from schools that already have established rugby programmes to others has become quite common in our schools rugby. I’ve stated my view – it shouldn’t happen and it has to stop.

A respected headmaster of a Joburg boys school, apparently, recently pointed out to a conference of his peers that they have the power to end the practice, and it’s quite simple – stop playing schools who indulge in those practices. If the heads agree to that (and they already have in terms of the charters and agreements they have signed – not to mention by virtue of their non-negotionable duty to be educational in all they do), then there wouldn’t be a problem.

But there is, and at the end of the day we have to accept that either some headmasters are dishonest, or they have lost control of what’s happening in their recruitment departments.

An Auckland-style shunning of those who break the rules would work, although it will punish the players at the banned school who had nothing to do with it. No, we have to get everyone to stop doing it – simple as that.

I made the mistake of taking to Twitter to defend my stand on the matter and came up against all the usual excuses and justifications.

No-one is saying that providing better opportunities to kids who have potential is a bad thing. On the contrary, the success stories of those who have had their lives turned around through bursaries should be sung from the hilltops. I do some work at two Joburg schools who have foundations doing just that and have come across magnificent examples aplenty.

But that’s not what we are talking about, although those who condone the practice of elite recruitment often try to disguise it as some sort of altruistic opportunity creation. Yeah right! They are after more wins for the first team at the end of the year, nothing else, and they should try and pull the wool over other people’s eyes.

As someone in that Twitter thread I’ve spoken of pointed out, there are cases where players who are already on bursaries at good rugby schools are lured to others. There is only one way to do that: offer a better financial deal. That’s buying, not bursary granting.

I’ll give you two examples, and let’s stop stuffing around and name some names. There was an under-14 player, a black boy on a full bursary, living in a top class hostel at a school that produces multiple provincial players who didn’t come back after playing in the Glenwood under-14 Festival at the beginning of the year.

Then there was the Golden Lions Craven Week player, also on a bursary, who suddenly upped and left for Paarl Boys’ High – he didn’t move out of financial need or the desire to be at a school where he would be recognised – he already had been.

There are examples aplenty of that sort of thing and not a single one can be justified. And please stop telling us that the parents approached you. The only cases where that happens are when they have already committed to commoditising their sons and are looking for a deal (as is pointed out in the NZ Herald article) and I’ve been told of a number of examples where that has happened here too.

Our top rugby schools have excellent coaches and the players work incredibly hard, I’ve seen that up close and first hand. Of course you deserve success if you are prepared to do that, and you can’t expect success if you don’t. But if we are to be ethical and educational – and that’s not an optional extra, school sport has to be just that -  then we should work hard at developing the children who are placed in our care.

We certainly can’t go shopping about for replacements and reinforcements to ensure our place on the top of the pile. If you do that you have no right to crow, and those who try to justify what you do in terms of transformation, rugby excellence and professional career pathways are as unethical and uneducational as you are.

And everyone should agree to never play against you again.