Lack of political will to blame for decline in coaching in rural areas

RUGBY development in the Eastern Cape villages is on a fast decline and dwindling rapidly. What once produced Springboks like Ian Fihlani, Samora Fihlani and Vusumzi Mbulali who both played for the South African U21 team is now almost non-existent.

To understand what exactly has gone wrong the Dispatch spoke to rugby coach Thembinkosi ‘ Bawa’ Vika, who was instrumental in the Border area for development.

Vika didn’t know where to start when trying to answer this question but said, “rugby development in the province’s rural areas is faced with a lack of political will.

“Let me put this straight. Government is not interested in sports development in villages and townships unless it will make money for them or the individuals leading that project. Secondly funding is a huge challenge, because rugby is not the same as soccer. You can play soccer on the side of the road.

“Rugby needs a playing field even if its not level. For instance in Tsholomnqa we used to play on slanted fields up until we got a proper field.”

He said another huge problem was the lack of playing fields in rural schools, making playing the game expensive in terms of transportation costs.

“Now if you are going to coach you have to transport the team to other locations where there are fields, because you can’t coach a player anywhere else.” He said all this goes back to willingness. “Former Model C schools are hands on with their sporting programmes and kids play sports on a regular basis. Now the most affluent people are taking their children to those schools.

“What really killed sports development was the group of teachers that entered the fieldwho have never played sport, so we had to change our curriculum to encompass the development of teachers.”

He said this was not sustainable as developers had to coach teachers and leave the clueless teacher to coach kids. That strategy required funding and Sarfu was the sole financial provider of rural sports development.

Vika said the most detrimental factor that led to the collapse of sports development in the greater Eastern Cape was Border Rugby politics.

“What happened is that there was a new executive that got elected and those individuals were more interested in personal gain.

“That’s when the focus was lost and the funder that was Sarfu pulled out its funding because they noticed there nothing being done with regards to rural sports development,” said Vika.

He said Mahlubi Puzi’s departure from Border Rugby to head up Saru’s women's rugby was another blow that contributed to this collapse.

“After Puzi left there was no political will in the organisation and although we had expertise, more people were elected into the Border structures through favouritism.

““I was one of those who was rated best developer in 1999 when Spornet donated a total of six million rand to rugby development.

“After that there was a new president who had his own faction within the organisation and there was friction within and then it impacted on development because now the executive was concerned about positions,” he said.

Vika said that’s when development started collapsing hence the standard of rugby gradually collapsed.