Schools scrum down over poaching row
NO GO: Stedman Gans was offered a scholarship worth R500 000 THE governing bodies of two Johannesburg boys’ schools are scheduled to meet next week in a bid to resolve a spat over the alleged poaching of two rugby players.
Last week, Parktown Boys’ High suspended fixtures against King Edward VII after accusing the Houghton school of violating an antipoaching deal.
This was after KES, at the last minute, accepted the two matric boys to its school to join its first team.
In response, Ken Ball, principal of the South African College High School in Cape Town, is threatening to “revisit” the school’s playing against other boys’ schools.
SACS cut sporting ties with KES in 2014 after one of its top rugby players, Lwazi Monakali, was poached, said Ball.
The two schools have since patched things up.
The Sunday Times has established that several other schools have lost budding rugby stars in recent months. These include a singlemedium Afrikaans school in the Western Cape, which lost a promising 16-year-old rugby player at the beginning of the year to Paarl Gimnasium.
The boy had been guaranteed a place in his former school’s first team.
Eddie Bateman, principal of Paarl Gimnasium, refused to reveal whether the boy had been granted a full scholarship but confirmed he had been attending classes there since the beginning of the year.
A second case involves a Grade 11 pupil from Hoërskool Louis Trichardt in Limpopo who was lured to a Durban school after being offered a full scholarship.
In Port Elizabeth, six boys, who should have enrolled at Alexander Road High in Grade 8 this year, have accepted scholarships from another school.
Stedman Gans, 18, a former head boy of Hoërskool Waterkloof in Pretoria, this week revealed that he turned down a three-year scholarship worth more than R500 000 offered to him by a private school in Johannesburg in 2013.
Gans said Hoërskool Waterkloof offered to pay half his school fees from Grade 10 to matric after he declined the private school’s offer.
Several schools failed to respond to e-mailed questions about rugby scholarships.
Hoërskool Waterkloof said it did not wish to comment because it “deemed this [to be] a situation between Parktown Boys’ High and King Edward VII”.
The principals of the two schools confirmed talks to resolve the issue.
Hilton College principal Peter Ducasse said the school did not support poaching, but “this does not mean that schoolboys should not be permitted to change schools of their own free will”.