Holiday madness!

It is said that there’s no rest for the wicked. That may be true, but in my experience, there are some very good men and women who happily give up their precious periods of rest, year after year, for the benefit of other people’s children.

I’m talking about the teachers at the best of our schools, of course.

They may or may not receive some sort of travel and sustenance allowance for the days that they are away from home. Their efforts are borne in mind, I hope, when annual bonuses are allocated, since they do it for no financial reward.

I spend some time at two of Joburg’s boys’ schools these days and their forthcoming short October holiday period – which was, I guess, originally intended to give everyone a breather ahead of the push towards the final exams – is jammed with tours and tournaments in all of the summer sports codes that have only just began their 2025/6 seasons.

Two of the big first team events, the Michaelmas Cricket Festival, hosted by Maritzburg College, and the SACS Waterpolo Tournament, have been going for many years. Now they have been joined by events in other age groups, including, of course, the basketball tournaments and festivals that have emerged in response to the phenomenal growth of the game at schools.

Opportunities are created for children to do what they love and to learn the lessons that touring provides, and those are positive things, but there is another side to it all.

It’s about the calendar. There’s room for just two rounds of interschool sports fixtures in the fourth term, before exams begin. Next year’s rugby and hockey schedules are congested, and they have been steadily growing over recent years. The result has been that first term dates available for summer sports have been curtailed over the years.

So, it’s beginning to look like the summer codes are being organised according to tournaments and festivals, rather than featuring a game a week against traditional local rivals, like we used to have back when I was involved. Hockey and rugby are also going that way, it seems.

That has resulted in a number of the schools that were involved in weekly fixtures against the schools where I work dropping out. They are no longer competitive and no longer field enough teams to make it worthwhile for the bigger schools. That’s a tragedy.

There are many reasons why that has happened, with one of the main ones being that they find themselves on the other side of the professionalisation of the school sports’ coin. Their talent has been stripped through recruitment and, admittedly, they no longer put in the effort that they used to (for their own reasons).

So, at schools where mass participation is valued – alongside elite high performance – you have to go the festival route to organise enough games for your teams.

That’s why, over the next two weeks, the schools I mentioned, along with others of their ilk across the land, will be in action in the KZN Midlands, in Gqeberha, at Grey College, in Pretoria, at Paarl, and Durban.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the action as much of it as I can, thanks to the magic of SuperSport Schools. And thanking the Lord for that horde of teachers who have forgone their well-deserved rest to make it all happen.

The author, Theo Garrun, writes in his personal capacity. His views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of SuperSport Schools.