It’s been a while since I spent Easter rugby festival Thursday in the little corner of KES’s fabulously quaint cricket pavilion that they are always kind enough to let me set up my laptop and to leave my stuff in. The pavilion’s where the operation that runs the festival is based and I was back there yesterday. I went home last night newly awed by size of the team that it takes to run an event like this, and by how hard they have to work to make it happen.
The Thursday of the Standard Bank KES Easter Festival is crazy. I’m sure it’s the same at all of them. There’s trouble at the gate because the security, rightly, won’t let cars in without the proper sticker, but the special guests who merit a sticker can’t get it unless they’re let inside. The teams have all suddenly got more officials than they originally said, and can they have kit for them, please? And nothing fits and can they swop? And someone is complaining that the distance between the stands and the field is too small – even though it has been been exactly the same for the last 25 years. And some of the boys haven’t pitched for their official team photos. And, of course, there’s loadshedding for most of the morning too.
The last time I was sitting there watching it all unfold, in 2019, it was bucketing down outside as well and that day, as was the case yesterday, the same person was in the middle of it all, making sense of the confusion and handing the requests and queries with amazing grace and efficiency. Derron Van Eeden has been the festival director at King Edward’s for all 19, or 20 of the festivals they’ve had – depending on whether you include the second one, which involved under-16 teams.
With all that experience, she has obviously learnt how to do the job by now, but it’s the way in which she interacts with the people in that never-ending queue that is the important thing. I’m convinced that she’s the reason why so many of the great schools of the land come back every year, and why so many others are clamouring to get in.
She doesn’t do it alone, of course. There’s a big team, as I said, and at its head is festival chairman Neil Darroch. He’s been around one year less that Derron and I watched him hovering in the background on Thursday, letting her handle the crises, but stepping in with calm gravitas when needed. They make a great team. Neil reminded me that Thursday’s action was the product of planning that began shortly after that rain-affected 2019 festival and that they suffered the disappointment and frustration of two cancelled festivals in between.
And I was thrilled to see that former KES operations manager Ian Sim is still involved. He retired last year, but has stayed on the organising committee and he too has worked out how this thing should be run by now.
It was wonderful to sit in the corner of the pavilion, behind a mountain of boxes of T shirts, accreditation tags, walkie talkie chargers, and very welcome chocolate marshmallow Easter eggs, and watch it all go down.
At some point the bustle ended. No-one came to ask or complain any more and we all went outside to look at the actual point of all that effort – the boys on the fields playing rugby and hockey.
There was a big crowd in, for a Thursday, and they sat in the sunshine watching the seamless presentation of game after game, blissfully unaware of what all it takes to make that happen.
I got a glimpse behind the scenes yesterday, and it was something to see.
If Derron lived in Australia by now she would have been nominated for a well deserved "gong".
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