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Lots to enthuse about last week




It’s going to be tough deciding on a single highlight of the week gone by, so can I list a couple of what we used to call “briefs” in my newspaper days instead?

It’s really about looking out for “gee, that was nice” moments in the area of school sport, mainly, and there were quite a few last week.

Peta Kaplan turned 70, and she has been a swimming administrator for most of those years. She ran primary school swimming in Joburg when I met her and then became involved in Usassa and later the Gauteng Education Department as a sports development officer. She drove the agenda of transformation and accessibility to all, hard, which many of those who were running the sport at school level, me included, found uncomfortable. But she was right, of course. She has dedicated her life to sport for children and to swimming in particular. She is a tiny woman but also a giant. Happy birthday Pete.

Jeppe put 670 boys and 75 teachers on 15 busses and sent them to Durban to compete against Westville Boys’ High in nine different codes over the weekend. They call it an ‘exchange’ – Westville were up here last year and they’ll be back in 2024. It’s a massive undertaking, and its not the biggest exchange around either – Pretoria Boys High sent quite a few more teams to Maritzburg College a few weeks ago – but I saw the prior arrangements being made, and I was on the WhatsApp groups over the weekend and I can tell you it was run like a military operation. The busses all got back more or less on schedule on Saturday night and not a single child was lost. Exchanges are becoming part of the boys schools sporting calendar, it’s a way of getting every boy a game, which doesn’t happen every weekend in their own towns. And, of course, there all the other lessons taught and learned on an excursion like that: a long bus trip with your team mates, being hosted by families at the other school, playing new opponents, seeing what other schools look like etc. Jeppe won both the 1st team games, rugby and hockey, not a mean feat following an eight-hour bus trip and a night in a strange bed the day before.

Because Jeppe was away in Durban on Saturday I was able to go to the KES vs Parktown fixture. Some have expressed concern at the one-sidedness of the rugby games, and they are right, but I saw other victories for Parktown on the day (other than the very real 3-2 win for their 1st hockey team). They definitely won the spirit and support battle in the stands. They fielded 14 rugby and 12 hockey teams, which meant a lot of boys were given the opportunity to compete. And you couldn’t fault a single Parktown boy on uniform, appearance, manners and sportsmanship – and rugby is only a vehicle for teaching those life skills, after all.  

At a post-match function, many years ago, we were bemoaning the fact that none of our teams could ever beat King Edward’s, when the great Paul Schutte (the old toppies out there will know who that is) said he believed that if an angel dropped out of heaven he would have number 10 on his back and he’d land at 44 St Patrick Road. In retelling that story over the years I’ve added in that there’d be two of them and the other one would wear number 2. Well, I saw a 10 and a 2 there on Saturday who might confirm that – except they never fell out of the sky, I know, they’ve been there all along. I’ve seen KES play several times this year and those two are never far away from anything good the team does. There have been some fabled hookers and flyhalves to come out of that school and they are carrying on that tradition. And like two of their predecessors who stand out in my memory – Kali and Ntubeni – they are black boys. The English boys schools in Joburg are playing a major role in the transformation of our game.

That flyhalf was given a breather towards the end of the game on Saturday and his replacement was Stuart Faber. He became, I see, the first 3rd generation player to play for the first team after his father, Michael in 1985/6 and his grandfather, Tutty, in 1956/7. Michael’s brother, Trevor, also played for the Reds and went to the Craven Week like his brother did. I was the manager of that Transvaal XV, back in 1988, around the time that Paul Schutte and others were having a beer one day, and trying to discover the secret of KES’s success.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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