Elite schools should not take centre stage
If ever there was proof needed that South Africa’s entire rugby system is back-tofront, upside-down or just plain broken, it came with the news that Griquas Currie Cup coach Peter Engledow has been snapped up by Paarl Boys High.
The move from one of our top eight senior teams, and a region that is set to become a Pro14 franchise, to admittedly one of our best school rugby set-ups, highlights how the coaching pipeline in South Africa is entirely haphazard and more like a game of snakes and ladders than a smooth path from A to B.
I don’t blame Engledow at all for the decision, because the truth is that Griquas had already told him they were not going to renew his contract at the end of the season, despite his successes with the team and the bigger challenges that surely await them.
What is infuriating, however, is that yet another highly promising young coach is heading in the wrong direction.
He joins a list that includes Dave Wessels, now coaching in Australia, Paul Treu, who has gone from huge success with the Springbok Sevens to being defence coach of the Stormers and now an assistant with the Western Province U21s, and even Nollis Marais, who took the Blue Bulls to the Currie Cup final in 2016 and won numerous age-group titles, but is now back languishing in the junior ranks.
South African rugby continues to pay far too much attention and spend way too many resources on the game at a few elite schools, which is not going to fix the problems that are increasingly becoming apparent the higher up the ladder you go. Rugby needs to become far more inclusive in order to grow the talent base, while at the same time, systems need to be refined at senior level such that the development of our best players is way more targeted and streamlined.
Unfortunately, putting schoolboy rugby in its rightful place – it should be a feeder to club rugby and not the focal point – is going to step on a few toes and shake up some “empires” that have been built; there are some big fish swimming around in those small ponds. One also gets the feeling that many people who are resistant to transformation have set up home in the schoolboy game, where their selfishness in trying to keep rugby as their sole preserve comes under less scrutiny from the authorities.
When schoolboy rugby was truly amateur, there were still little empires here and there, but they were based on power and ego. Today, the schoolboy game is awash with money and unscrupulous, greedy agents and administrators abound, the welfare of our children counting for nothing.
It seems some of our leading rugby schools are more fully professional than some of our senior provincial sides, and with that focus on money, there is going to be increasing pressure on our children. In particular, they are being coerced into focusing on rugby alone – basically choosing the sport as their career – to the detriment of their education. Never mind what playing win-atall-costs rugby at that age does to their skill levels.
It was heartening to recently hear AB de Villiers, one of our greatest cricketers and a phenomenal all-round sportsman at school, say he was definitely not in favour of specialising too soon.
“I don’t believe a kid should choose too early what they’re going to do, at school you want to be participating in as much as possible. It worked for me, I didn’t just play cricket at school and I only decided that was the way to go later on. I was passionate about playing rugby for the Wit Bulle and I was a scratch golfer, plus I played tennis until I was 15 and I think it was a mistake giving it up then.
“Any sport that gets your feet and hands going is going to be good and I don’t believe schoolchildren should specialise too soon,” De Villiers, a product of Affies in Pretoria, said.