This Easter weekend sees the start of the school boy rugby season with 3 bumper rugby festivals. The top rugby schools in South Africa will be attending these festivals along with teams touring from Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. School boy rugby in South Africa is in such demand there are 3 dedicated tv channels for these events streaming the matches live.
Each festival will see in excess of 120K spectators with tickets varying between R60 and R150 each so this is a big money spinner for the hosting schools. I am sure the international touring teams have their expenses covered by the host schools. School boy rugby is big business these days and these festivals will also receive tv viewership deals.
The schools receive many sponsorship deals with many businesses owned by school old boys stepping in and offering funding. The sponsors can relate to the school teams and the importance of sport in the communities because they have been through the same system and experienced this themselves. This is why the popularity of schoolboy rugby is growing and is basically at a semi professional level.
School matches will see crowds of 10-30k and most are ticket affairs with schools raking in R1 million plus for home games. This is sustainable due to the ever growing demand and I would be one of those paying public if I was in Cape Town. Nothing beats a school derby if you were once part of it.
School rugby coaches are paid more than coaches training professional teams around the world which is kind of absurd, but this is the new reality. The best coaches are being poached to coach the upcoming new talent in South Africa and is like having an assembly line of top players coming off the production line. Every year we see the school players being courted by agents and one of the players recently joined a top Irish club and is being tipped to play for their national team. Expectations are high at this level and most are in a position to step it up turning professional. The 5 years of coaching has done this and are streaks ahead of other players their age in other countries.
The schools have their own athletic high performance department hiring Bio kineticists, Sports Scientists, Physiotherapists plus the usual back room staff involving various specialist coaches including analysts. This is no different from a professional rugby team yet this is what your 13 year old son will encounter and be offered for his 5 years in high school.
When you see the grassroots of the sport being taken care of it is not a surprise when the national team is performing well. The television coverage not only provides old boys the chance to watch their school teams playing ,but also family and friends who cannot attend or live abroad. The television streaming app has over 1 million subscribers paying monthly fees and are expected to surpass 2 million this season. The tv broadcasters are on to a winning ticket with this and each year more old boys are joining becoming paying customers.
What is rather scary is other countries are not at this level and are unlikely to achieve something similar due to other sports competing diluting the numbers. Rugby amongst the top schools in SA is the number 1 sport and football does not come close. One could imagine if this was replicated with other sports that are popular in other countries how that sport could take off. The problem is how many schools are offering sports these days as from what I noticed this has been left up to local clubs due to schools not having the facilities due to selling off playing fields. In SA the exact opposite has happened and the schools are expanding offering far more opportunities than they used to.
