I spoke to the coach of the University of Johannesburg 1st rugby team last week - about their seventh consecutive triumph in the Pirates Grand Challenge competition - and he said some remarkable, and disturbing, things about the way rugby is going.
I asked him about the club’s prospects for next year and the new signings they had made, and there was a tinge of despair in his reply.
He was told, he explained, by the father of one of the Golden Lions SA Schools players, that his son would be going next year to where the biggest contract offer came from.
That’s a 17-year-old we’re talking about, being traded like a professional, and the vocabulary used is the same you read in the media when they describe the negotiations around the signing of Mesut Ozil and Paul Pogba.
Put aside the educational considerations - that contract-chasing player still has to write his matric prelim exams next week - and the financial and sporting wisdom of investing so heavily in players so young has to be questioned.
The advent of the Varsity Cup competition, as much as it has enriched the first part of the rugby season, has led to an unseemly scramble for players emerging from the schoolboy ranks.
Universities have always given sporting bursaries, and players with ambitions to study further have had the privilege of having their fees taken care of.
That’s been great, but now it seems that the Varsity Cup has become a stepping stone into the professional ranks and some of the so-called students are in fact already professionals, contracted by the unions and placed in the local universities for the time being.
You have to tie the most promising players up early. Everyone is chasing them - even, it emerged this year, the overseas clubs and unions.
The sudden interest in players at the recent Craven Week by scouts from French clubs was prompted, I’m told, by a ruling by World Rugby that players who represent the countries at the annual Under-20 World Championship cannot play for another country later on.
That has happened in the past from time to time, and the implication is that if a promising South African star is prevented from going to that tournament, and he starts a career in a foreign country at a young age, he can play for that nation in four or five years time.
And they are offering Euro-based contracts that local unions cannot match. So, it’s rumoured, 35 players at the Craven Week were signed up by clubs in France and England.
But what of the science behind athlete development? Are there no such things as late, or early, developers, and is it really a good thing for a 17-year-old to commit himself exclusively to physical activity geared to a specialised role in a particular sport, as an expensive professional contract will surely demand he must do?
I’m a rugby fan - no denying that - and I marvel at the skills and ability of the top players. They became so good precisely because they are specialists, and they have received the best physical preparation and tactical coaching.
So I can’t, in fairness, condemn out of hand the system that produces players capable of providing such entertainment. But the stars are the exception, that’s the point, and yet the entire system seems to be geared to their identification and progression these days.
And it’s driving prices up. That’s why UJ’s time-honoured model of tying up the best of the local school players on bursaries isn’t working any more. They can’t afford them.
Some of those players are already professionals, in effect, having been lured to particular schools by financial incentives.
And if the provincial unions use the Varsity Cup as part of their professional growth path, then even the exhilaration of inter-varsity sport is being removed.
No wonder the UJ coach sighed deeply when I asked him about next year’s signings.
He is a happy man, nonetheless, his team - and all of them are youngsters still - have just won the Pirates Grand Challenge for a remarkable seventh year in a row! - Independent Media