Theo Garrun Talking Schoolboy rugby

  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...