Schools’ water polo is a feel-good success story
If ever there was a school sporting success story, it has to be water polo.
Over the next two weekends, the epicentre of the sport will be in Johannesburg with six national tournaments taking place at local schools, covering boys’ and girls’ polo, at 1st team level, and the junior age groups.
Over 2 000 boys and girls will be in action, playing several matches a day, and at the end, they will have spent three days in healthy activity, outdoors (or indoors in some cases), in the company of like-minded teenagers.
That’s quite an achievement these days when there’s so much talk of young people becoming more and more sedentary and refusing to move away from the electronic devices that occupy so much of their time.
It’s all happened quite quickly. Water polo doesn’t have the 100-year-old history at schools that sports like cricket and rugby do. I remember when inter-school water polo matches were pick-up games, arranged for boys, after swimming galas on Wednesday afternoons.
In 1981, I was part of a small committee that resurrected the Old Eds schools tournament, inviting some out-of-town teams to play in what was then the only national event. That tournament morphed into the King Edward VII (KES) Water Polo Tournament that takes place next weekend – one of the indoor events, in the impressive Mark Stevens Aquatic Centre at KES.
Around 1983, a pre-season national tournament, to be hosted by SACS in Cape Town, was started up and it and the KES tournament have remained among the most prestigious boys’ water polo tournaments on the calendar ever since.
The South African Schools inter-provincial tournament was five years old at that stage. It involved u19 boys teams only and, I recall, it was generally won by what was then Natal, every year.
Girls’ water polo made a short-lived appearance a few years later with an interprovincial tournament, involving Transvaal, Natal, and Western Province. The Transvaal team was made up of girls from Rand Park, Hyde Park, Roosevelt, and Krugersdorp High. The local girls’ schools weren’t interested in the game then, and the experiment was short-lived.
How that’s changed! Girls’ water polo, I’m told, is now the fastest-growing sport in the country, and the girls-only schools have embraced it and taken it to a level that we never dreamed of in those days.
In December this year, the 50th Schools Water Polo South Africa Inter-Provincial Tournament will be held in Johannesburg and it will be massive. There will be boys and girls teams in all the age groups – u13, u14, u15, u16 and u19. Some claim it is the biggest tournament in the world, although I’m not sure about that.
And the girls take centre stage this weekend with the u15 Shaun Fuchs Tournament at Crawford College Lonehill, and the Old Petrians – the foremost girls’ 1st team tournament – at St Peter’s College.
Some of those girls will be back a few days later, playing in the Reef Cup tournament at St Stithians. The Reef Cup was originally for the Joburg co-ed schools but has developed into a massive national event involving 20 girls’ teams – involving most of the top schools, and a few from Zimbabwe – and 20 boys’ teams, drawn from the schools that aren’t invited to the KES tournament that is on at the same time.
The Indigo Tournament, for u15 boys, is on at Parktown Boys’ High over that weekend (named after “Indigo Girl“, the Watershed hit song. Watershed’s lead singer, Craig Hinds, is a Parktown old boy. He was a top water polo player in his day and taught and coached at the school before going into music). Across town, the Ken Short Tournament, for u14 boys, will be staged at Jeppe High School for Boys.
The KES tournament involves 16 teams. The two junior events are bigger: 24 teams at Parktown and 22 at Jeppe.
That means well over 2 000 players participating over the two weekends, and I’m not even talking about the scores of teachers, coaches, and other adults who will also be there.
As I said, it’s an undoubted sporting success story. And the standards are high. At u18 level, South African teams have done very well against international opposition. At senior level, we drop off, mainly because the game is professional in much of the world and our part-timers simply cannot put in the training time that the other teams do.
The administration of the game at senior level is also (to be very kind) not good – but that’s a story for another time.
The success and growth of water polo as a school sport have to be seen in the context of the effort required to play it. Apart from swimming training – and most polo players also swim for their schools – there are practices every day and they are generally far longer than those in other sports. It’s not a game that anyone can try out. You have to be a strong swimmer first.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming glut of action. I’m in awe of the boys and girls who have decided to get out there and be part of it, and grateful that we still have teachers who are prepared to sacrifice their time the way they do and pleased that a small group of teachers decided in the early 1980s to start taking the game seriously.
You’ll be able to watch just about all of it on SuperSport Schools, of course.
