The traditional 3-day long Easter Rugby festivals are immensely popular and financially viable but given how professional the approach to all aspects of schoolboy rugby has become in recent years, these festivals seem like they are outdated concepts as far as player welfare is concerned. Expecting boys who in many cases are big, faster and strong than the professional adult players of 20 years ago to give it their all for 3 often very competitive matches in 5 days is not that practical. There would be a massive outcry if today’s full time senior pro’s were asked to expose their bodies to the same kind of attrition. The top school players often have to play 25 or more games in a season spanning 6-months, with the 3-match day festival crunch generally coming at the start and usually being one of two festivals that rugby boys take part in within a short period of time.
The organisers of the Noord-Suid festival held recently in Pretoria are buoyant about their festival’s future believing they can expand it to as many as 12 schools (6 North of the Karoo and 6 from the Cape) and attract the best rugby schools from the respective regions, simply because their product is more in line with catering the demands placed on the bodies of young players. The Noord-Suid Festival has three major benefits at the moment, which are expected to be big selling points in their attempts to expand. These are:
1) Only 2 match days
2) An extra day’s rest in-between match days
3) A 2nd XV festival run concurrently to the 1st XV event
The Wildeklawer Skouspel which is regarded as the premier school rugby festival in South Africa, attracting the five national powerhouse schools as well as many of the others that make up the Top 20 in any given year, is also a 2-day festival. However unlike Noord-Suid, it usually falls outside of school holidays and is therefore restricted to the long weekend created by the Freedom Day Public Holiday (27 April) and in some years Workers Day (01 May).
I have a slightly different take on this. I am not against the change to 2 day festivals, but I think there could be a different solution to the over-playing of boys in the 3 day festivals. It should be mandatory for teams to be rotated.The problem is that unlike in the olden days where tours were all about giving everyone a chance to play, the obsession with winning has killed that notion.If a law was set that “no boy should play consecutive 140 minutes of rugby on your” it would go a long way in player management.
Further to this, because there are so many festivals around nowadays, schoolmasters/coaches need to be adults and know that regardless of their ambitions, they need to limit the number of festivals they participate in. In my view, it makes no sense to partake in more than 2 festivals in a season.
And then we wonder why the lifespan of a South African rugby player has diminished so much in recent years.