Theo Garrun Talking Schoolboy rugby

  My school sporting highlight of the week? It’s more a time of year, rather than an event, and I love it because of the memories it stirs: provincial rugby selection season. When the first chills of winter begin to bite, as they have this week, you know the Craven Week trials are on. I spent 10 years on those selection panels and the one consistent memory of those times is that it was bloody cold. On a typical U18 trials day the final game will kick off at around 5.30pm – sunset – and you’d have been on the side of the field in places like Alberton, or Krugersdorp, or, worst of all at UJ, deep in the valley and next to the Westdene Dam, all afternoon, steadily cooling down. We’d whinge, but I used to look forward to it all year, and from year to year.   It wasn’t easy. Trials are definitely not the best way to pick a team and, as the years passed, the task was made more difficult because racial quotas had to be met – it’s much worse now. And you’ll never please everyone...

My sporting highlight of the week? …. There were a couple of those massive “exchanges” this weekend, which saw whole schools, practically, getting on buses and traveling halfway across the country to play traditional rivals who will be coming up to their place next year.  They are major logistical undertakings and they depend on the community at the other end opening their doors and inviting the opponents in to stay for the night on Friday. And, by the nature of the schools involved, the boys do everyone proud by rising to the occasion and showing their class – Jeppe were away at Westville a fortnight ago and they hosted Northwood this weekend and you could’ve cut and pasted the praise heaped on the visitors by the hosts in Durban, and by the Jeppe community today. I know the KES parents are saying the same thing about the Westville boys this weekend, and they get the same response from the College parents when they go to Pietermaritzburg every other year. Affies travelled down to ...

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 Westvill...

  My sporting highlight of the week? …. It’s been rugby all the way and I got excited for various reasons, on Thursday already, about the Muir College vs Parktown game at Grey High, knowing that it was likely to be eclipsed as the long weekend unfolded. Then, on Friday night the Lions beat the Pumas in the Currie Cup. It’s always a highlight for me when they win these days, and that they stopped the defending champions made it more special. But the real stars this week were aways going to be the schoolboys and weren’t there some cracking games? Hilton holding out against nearly 10 minutes of ferocious attack from Michaelhouse to win 20-17 and extend their unbeaten run in the Midlands derby; and Jeppe scoring two tries in the final minute to snatch a draw against Selborne when the game looked gone for them, were two of them. At the Wildekalwer Festival in Kimberley where the big guns were playing, things went pretty much as expected, with no upsets. The Grey College vs Garsfon...

  Anyone watching the live streaming from the Standard Bank Grey High School Festival? I woke up this morning with a bit of FOMO – I used to go down there in my newspaper days – but thanks to SuperSport Schools you can watch the games from anywhere today – hasn’t that been a game-changer? So, I got to see Parktown Boys’ High play Muir College and there’s an early contender for my highlight of the week right there. It probably won’t get the final nod – not that my whimsical ramblings count for anything at all – there are just too many big games between now and Monday at Grey, and in Kimberley where the “super schools” will be in action at the Wildeklawer Festival. But, for me Parktown vs Muir was a significant encounter in a number of ways. First of all, it was played on the B field at the festival, which is actually Grey’s main cricket oval – The Pollock Field – certainly one of the most beautiful school grounds not to have the Western Cape mountains as its backdrop. I’ve w...

  Much of what I’m going to say here I said last year this time. That sort of repetition used to be a no-no, back when I was newspaper reporter. But I’m not one anymore, and what I experienced on Saturday at the King Edward VII School vs Jeppe High School for Boys rugby derby at KES was so similar to what happened at Jeppe in April last year, that you really couldn’t tell the story differently this time around. Anyone who was there – and anyone else in Joburg who might have wanted to go to the game wouldn’t have found a spot to watch it from any way – was treated to the same spectacle; a riot of colours (mainly red), a cacophony from the stands and, on the field, the same passion and commitment and skills levels. Those skills, admittedly were less than perfectly executed at times, but if you are going to hold that against those 17 and 18-year olds, under that pressure, in that cauldron, then you were obviously not one of the 9 000-odd people shoe-horned into the school on Satur...

  My school sports highlight of the weekend? …. The rugby festivals, obviously.   Everything about them, really, but in particular, for me, seeing some familiar faces, men and women who have spent much of their lives in service of sport at schools. There are too many to list them all, but I know there will be no offence taken if I’ve left someone out. I spoke of the guys in the KES Festival office the other day, Derron van Eeden, Neil Darroch and Ian Sim – people with weighty jobs over the festival weekend – but always gracious and courteous in all their dealings with everyone. And while I was at KES I saw Tinus Diedericks, the Golden Lions Schools Rugby chairman, Brad Ireland and Ian Rickelton, long-termers at St David’s, Hans Coetzee – a rugby coaching legend in these parts, and from the school cricket world, Niels Momberg, who is commentating on SuperSport Schools. Down the road at St John’s, I had a word with Arnold Geerdts, who has been the announcer there for the last 15...

  I’ve been at more of these Easter Rugby festivals than most. I don’t know of many who have been around longer than me and I’d have to go back to the 1980s when the Saints Festival was the only show in town to recall a day like Saturday at the Standard Bank King Edward Easter Festival.   I asked around and no-one could tell me if there was a record crowd in (the ticket sales reconciliation will only be done later on), but it seemed that way to me. I couldn’t see how any more people could have been squeezed in. Someone (one of those long-term volunteers I spoke about on Thursday) asked me afterwards if KES vs Paarl Boys’ High was a good game – he couldn’t see a thing from where he was standing, he told me. He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get anywhere near the field, I’d wager.   Then there was the rugby, particularly the last four games of the day. For me, there were two things that I particularly loved about them: the refusal of the underdogs to lie down; and the qua...

  The Easter festivals on the go at St Stithians, St John’s and King Edward at the moment don’t happen by accident. The planning for the next year’s event typically starts the week after this year’s event ends. In fact, I’m sitting this week in the organisation’s offices at King Edward’s and I’ve been hearing the indefatigable and ever-cheerful festival organiser, Derron van Eeden, talking about next year all the time. The schools are already beginning to accept their invitations for 2024, which will be KES’s 20 th festival. There’s an army at work in and around the organiser’s office. Some are new faces to me, but most I’ve been seeing every time for years. They are all volunteers, their sons all long gone from the school, and yet they stick their hands up every year, and it’s them that have made the festival a long-term success story. As I walked down Oak Avenue on the first morning I heard whistles blowing on the rugby field and hockey Astro, which meant the boys were playi...

  Forgive me for repeating myself (again), but the great thing for us lovers of schoolboy rugby is that, for the last 30-odd years, the same thing happens every Easter weekend. The cream of the rugby playing schools are in action in Joburg, or down at Kearsney College, in one of the Standard Bank Festivals and there is a glut of fascinating matchups in prospect. So, like last year, I am cherry-picking the games I’d really like to see and going on a fantasy trip around the various venues, imaging I work on the Starship Enterprise and that dear old Scotty has the power to beam me up, down and sideways, and even backward and forward in time, so that I’d be able to see: On Thursday. Paarl Boys’ High against Selborne. Booizhaai are at KES for the 1 st time and it’s an opportunity to see a team that’s never outside of the top three in the land. Selborne are one of the top teams in the Eastern Cape and it would be good to see if they can match the WP powerhouse. Then I’ll ask Scott...

  My chirp the other day about the unfairness of Western Province having two teams in each of the Craven, under-18 Academy and Grant Khomo Weeks, met with the expected disdain from people south of the Great Karoo, and the issue quickly pivoted to the real injustice in schools interprovincial rugby: the continued inclusion of players from the three Paarl schools – Boys High Gimansium and Boland Landbou – and Stellenbosch’s Paul Roos Gimnasium in the Western Province teams. The two issues are tied together. The inclusion of multiple WP teams in the Youth Weeks is being justified on the grounds of the excellence of the schools and the number of good players produced, yet the four consistently top schools are actually in the Boland region, and they contribute the majority of the players to the province teams, year after year. It’s a matter that has been raised many times, including by me, and I’ve been castigated for raising the same old issue over and over, implying that because i...

  I found the Golden Lions Schools teams for the upcoming youth weeks, released this week, disturbing. I have no reason to doubt the honesty of the selectors, and the players named are the best in their positions, I’m sure. But the picture painted is a very sad one. What it shows is that schools rugby in the province has all but died. People at schools are screaming bias and unfair treatment on social media. I can’t comment on that, but I do believe that an organisation that exists to promote rugby at schools in its region has done the game harm with this selection. In short – there were 115 boys named (in the five squads of 23). And 93 percent of them come from five schools, Monument (25), Helpmekaar (23), Noordheuwel (20), KES (19) and Jeppe (19). There are three players from Northcliff, two from St John’s, and one each from Parktown, Linden and Dinamika. That’s out of 40 rugby-playing schools in the province. I spoke to one of the teachers at Jeppe who is on the committee ...

  The rugby season is passing in a flash. We are already into the midyear exams break and the Craven Weeks teams are being announced, and the fixtures for the first two days of the week, which takes place from July 4 to 9 at Rondebosch Boys’ High School, have been released. The Craven Week, once the crown jewel of youth rugby in the country, and the envy of the rugby-playing world, is looking a little frayed around the edges. It never happened in 2020 or 2021 because of Covid-19, but before then the long-term sponsor of the various Youth Weeks, Coca-Cola, had pulled out and SA Rugby was unable to find a replacement. There was even talk of the week not happening this year because of financial constraints. It’s on however, and we should be grateful, although SA Rugby will only be financially supporting the Craven Week and the under-16 Grant Khomo Week and the others – the Academy Weeks and the under-13 week - will take place at the expense of the parents. The question is, how d...

  Jeppe 3rd vs Benoni High 1st One of the criticisms of professionally run school rugby programmes is that they absorb so much of the available funding in the school and channel it into the 1 st team, and the other A teams, that there’s little over to fund the rest of the programme. It happens in keeping with the ethos that winning games is the whole point of the exercise. Wins mean ranking points on the weekly published lists that are so popular with just about everyone except me – and no one cares what I think. There are different ways of measuring success and, unfortunately, the performance of the 1 st rugby team is regarded as one of the most significant. School rugby teams have come along in leaps and bounds. The top coaches employed by the elite schools have introduced cutting edge skills and tactical techniques, supported by science-based physical preparation, nutrition, sports psychology etc. All of that costs money and it has undoubtedly resulted in standards of play...

  Were you at the game on Saturday? I was, along with, I’d guess about 12 000 others. You couldn’t get a mouse in at Jeppe. The stands, the koppie, the surrounding trees, every bit of grass around the field held spectators dressed in red or black and white, and there must have been another 1000 or so who were behind them, without a view of the field, but happy to be part of the atmosphere. It was a special edition of one of Joburg’s oldest schoolboy rugby derbies – KES and Jeppe have been playing each other since 1935 and Saturday’s 27-26 win for the Reds was their 60 th against Jeppe’s 27. It was special, for me anyway, because it was back after the two-year Covid gap and that was enough. The size of the crowd, and the good cheer and civility on display make me think many others felt the same way. On their records going in, not many would have expected Jeppe to win, but after conceding two tries early on, they lifted themselves and sheer passion, bravery and determinatio...

Picture: Rapport, from Frans Lombard's Facebook Page My posting of this picture on Facebook earlier this week caused a bit of a fuss. It was taken at the Primary School section of the Wildeklawer festival by freelance photographer Frans Lombard, who posted a cutting featuring it on his Facebook page. He was, rightly, proud of the fact that he had one of his pictures appear on page 3 of the Rapport last Sunday. The caption on the photo translates, roughly, as “Out of the way, Vleis is on the charge!” Frans Lombard is the nicest of all the long-lens men that I used to come across regularly in the corners of school rugby fields back when I was in that game. He is a brilliant photographer and this is a stunning image. My misgivings about it have nothing to do with Frans. Snaps are just that – split second captures. They freeze the instant and the context, the past and the future, are not part of them. Among the comments to my post were two from journalists I know and respect....

  Picture: Martin Ashworth Photography, from the Michaelhouse Facebook page I have often confessed that sometimes I’m a terrible hypocrite in these weekly meaningless rants of mine on the state of schools rugby in the country. I accept that I shouldn’t be condemning the professionalisation of schools rugby programmes and then enjoy watching the top schools teams play so damn much. And I should also admit that I know those teams have almost all been assembled by recruiting players from other schools, far and wide. I’m against professionalisation because it’s sometimes uneducational. It’s based on winning as the dominant value, which doesn’t leave room for teaching the other valuable lessons that sport is supposed to do. And I disapprove of recruitment because, while it may be good for individual children, it’s leaving a desert out there and the game is dying everywhere but in the strongest rugby schools. The problem is that those practices work. The schools that employ them pr...

  Picture: Rondebosch Boys' High Facebook There were some unexpected, to say the least, results in Saturday’s 1 st team rugby matches across the country. Several teams have shown that there is perhaps no reason to believe that the pre-Covid pecking order in SA schools rugby will continue, as of right. Their performances at the weekend have added extra spice to next weekend’s Wildeklawer Festival at which just about all the top schools will be appearing. The consistent top four over the years, Grey College, Paarl Boys’ High, Paarl Gimnasium and Paul Roos Gimnasium were all shocked. Paarl Gim’s 2022 is supposed to be their “dream team” and they certainly started off the year that way. They beat Monument and Glenwood easily earlier on and looked to be on a roll. Affies, on the other hand had a few good wins, but then went down to Garsfontein for the 1 st time ever. They were not the favourites on Saturday, but won 29-26. Grey College don’t lose very often and they didn’t on Satu...