Jim Hamilton has been to the NFL and to big football matches. He was back and forth to South Africa across the Test series and the thing that got him was two teams of 17-year-olds in Stellenbosch. John Smit let him finish, agreed with all of it, and then put a number on what the system does to the ones who arrive late.
South African schoolboy rugby is not a subject that normally travels. A 63-cap Scotland lock stood on the touchline at Paul Roos Gymnasium, watched the first XV come out, and decided he had just been shown the reason the Springboks are world champions twice over.
“There’s no coincidence that you’re back-to-back world champions,” Hamilton said.
Smit, who has one of those winner’s medals and captained the side that won the first, did not argue with a word of it. Then he said something that will start an argument in every staff room in the Western Cape, and it comes with a number attached. The number is 80. It is further down.
Hamilton was the guest on “I Love Rugby”, the podcast hosted by George Gregan (139 Tests for Australia) and Smit (111 for South Africa), in the episode published on Tuesday 8 September. It was billed as a review of the 29-24 win in Soweto that put South Africa 2-1 up. The best fifteen minutes of it were about children.
Blue on one side, maroon on the other
Hamilton had spoken at an event the night before and gone to the match the following day. He was allowed pitch side for the warm-up, which is where most of what he took from it happened.
“Just watching the faces as they were running out, and you saw the blue on the left and you saw the maroon on the right, and just the buying collectively of the schools, of the parents, the way that the kids played against each other.”
The detail he kept returning to was not the rugby. South African schoolboy rugby had put something around the edge of the field that he had not seen anywhere else.
“You saw the old boys that, you know, should have been Springboks if the knee didn’t blow out, wearing their blazers.”
Read that again, because it is the whole system in one sentence. The men who did not make it are still there, in uniform, on the touchline, forty years on. A boy playing that fixture is not playing a school match. He is playing in front of every previous version of himself, and some of them are wearing the blazer he wants.
Hamilton has seen the alternatives up close, across fourteen seasons at Leicester, Edinburgh, Gloucester, Montpellier and Saracens.
“I’ve had some great experiences in my life in other sports, you know, I’ve been to the NFL, I’ve been to big football games, but there was this kind of different emotion. I think it’s because they were young lads, right? They were like 17, 18 years old.”
“What’s the big deal, right?”
Hamilton’s own framing of why this does not compute in the north is the sharpest thing he says all episode.
“It sounds weird to live the experience of watching schoolboy rugby, right? So if you said that in the north, [they’d] be like, yeah, well, what’s the big deal?”
He knows the answer to that from the other side of a spreadsheet. He is content director at RugbyPass, where schoolboy footage is a deliberate part of the offer, and the numbers came back higher than anyone expected: what Will Jordan looked like at 17, what Caleb Clarke looked like at 17, clips he describes as getting millions of interactions globally.
So the audience was never in doubt. The size of the thing behind the clips was.
The output backs him. On the only measure that does not reset every season, the count of old boys who have gone on to play Test rugby for South Africa, Paul Roos has produced 56 Springboks, more than any school in the country. Grey College in Bloemfontein is second on 49. Only one school outside South Africa belongs in the same conversation: Auckland Grammar in New Zealand, which has produced 53 All Blacks.
George Gregan reached for American college football, and he was not being flippant
The comparison that came back at Hamilton was not another rugby country. Gregan went straight to the United States.
“Our top 20 traditional high schools that are rugby schools [are] probably more [like] college NFL college systems than anything else, because these boys have got S&C, they’ve got dietitians, biomechanics.”
He had a live example. Gregan was at the Aer Lingus College Football Classic at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday 29 August, where TCU played North Carolina to open the season, with Bill Belichick on the North Carolina sideline and, as Gregan put it, some of the players earning millions of dollars a year at that age.
Then the line that matters, because it comes from a man who won a World Cup and has been to both:
“And the atmosphere… at the schoolboy rugby in South Africa… it felt a lot tighter.”
Tighter than an ESPN-televised college game at the Aviva. Gregan is not a man given to flattering South African schoolboy rugby for the sake of it.
The money is the difference. Nobody in Stellenbosch is on a seven-figure name-and-likeness deal, and the schools involved are fee-paying state schools rather than private academies. Everything else, the strength and conditioning, the nutrition, the analysis, the broadcast, the weekly national ranking, has already crossed over.
Read also: Steve Hansen and Ewen McKenzie went looking for what separates this Springboks side and found that two of the six reasons South Africa lead this series cannot be coached.
What South African schoolboy rugby costs, according to the man it worked for
This is the point where a South African panellist normally accepts the compliment. Smit did not.
“It just creates this unbelievable pipeline, but… it’s become everything for a schoolboy in South Africa to get into the right school, to maybe get poached, and to try and get himself an opportunity.”
To get poached. He said it as a stage of the pathway, in the same breath as getting into the right school, because for a 15-year-old with a good August that is exactly what it is.
“But the sacrifices… and the balance is certainly lost.”
Put a number against that sentence. A first XV is fifteen boys and only a handful of them will ever turn professional. The rest have trained like professionals for five years for a career that never arrives, and the ones who were moved across the country at 15 to do it have also given up their home, their friends and their first school.
Smit is not an outsider taking a shot at a system he does not understand. He came through it, captained the country 83 times, won the thing in 2007, and now sits on the same panel that called Soweto the Test that decides the series. He flagged mid-sentence that this deserves a proper hearing rather than a passing swipe, and said it was a topic for another day. Then he gave the answer anyway.
Twelve is fine. Fifteen is not.
His line is not where most people expect it to be. Smit has no objection to a big school going looking for a talented child and paying for his education.
“If you’ve got a 12-year-old kid finishing primary school, a big school will see there’s some talent there and offer them free schooling. I’m quite happy for that to happen at the age of 12, and you get into a school and you live the traditions and you become a part of Paul Roos, or whatever the school is.”
At 12 a boy arrives, gets absorbed and grows up there. The problem starts when a school goes shopping later, for a first XV rather than for a pupil.
“A lot of these schools don’t get it quite right with the 12-year-olds and they start buying them at 15, 16, 17, and these change allegiances, and then the tribal system comes into question.”
The tribal system is the product. Strip it out and the fixture that fills a town on a Saturday in August is just an under-19 game between two well-drilled sides, which is what the rest of the world already has and nobody watches.
So here is the rule, from a World Cup-winning captain, on the record:
“There’s some talk to be done around what the top 20 schools should look like, and I think the criteria should be 80% of that team, when they’re in their last year, needs to have started at that school when they were 13 years old.”
Twelve of a matchday fifteen. Recruit whoever you like at 12 and 13, and then live with what you built.
The rule bites in exactly one place, and it is the right one
Read it as a piece of regulation and it is more precise than it sounds.
It does nothing to the scouting of primary-school children, which is where most of the actual talent identification happens and which Smit has already blessed. It does nothing to a school’s coaching, its facilities or its budget. It leaves three places in every fifteen open for a late arrival, which is enough for the boy who genuinely gets found at 16 and not enough to buy a season.
What it kills is the specific thing Smit is describing: assembling a first XV in the eighteen months before matric by taking finished players off other schools. Under an 80% rule those players are ineligible for the fixture the school wants them for, so the market for them closes on its own without a single hearing.
There is a real cost, and it should be said plainly. Thomas du Toit grew up on a farm outside Koringberg, went to a small country school, played U13 Craven Week for Boland and moved to Paarl Boys’ High at 15. He captained Paarl Boys’ High two years later, played for South Africa Schools that August, and has since played Test rugby as a tighthead. Under Smit’s rule he would have been one of the three, or he would have stayed where he was.
That is the argument against, and it is not a small one. A system that goes looking finds boys that no other system would ever see. The counter is that du Toit was found at 13, at Craven Week, by a provincial selector, and the move at 15 was a consequence of being found rather than the reason for it. The scouting Smit wants to keep is the part that found him.
Frequently asked
Which South African school has produced the most Springboks?
Paul Roos Gymnasium in Stellenbosch, with 56. Grey College in Bloemfontein is second on 49 and leads the count for the professional era.
What did John Smit actually propose?
That the top 20 rugby schools be held to a rule where 80% of the first XV in their final year must have been at that school since the age of 13. He made the proposal on the “I Love Rugby” podcast on Tuesday 8 September.
Is schoolboy rugby in South Africa professional?
Not formally. The leading schools are fee-paying state schools and the players are not paid. The coaching, conditioning, analysis and broadcast around them have been professional for years, which is why the leading schools now run full-time conditioning and dietetics staff.
What is Craven Week?
South Africa’s national schools tournament, played between provincial representative sides at U13 and U18, with Grant Khomo Week at U16 in between. The South Africa Schools side is picked from the U18 tournament.
Read next: Fourteen of the fifteen do not turn professional, and one of the ones who did has the best description of what the machine does to the people inside it: Bryan Habana on the sausage factory of sport, the family betrayal, and what happened when the rugby stopped.
Your turn
Two ways to read a school offering a place to a promising 15-year-old. Either it is a boy from a small school being given a stage he would never otherwise stand on, which is how Thomas du Toit got to Test rugby. Or it is a first XV being assembled with a chequebook eighteen months before matric, which is what Smit says is killing the allegiance that makes the fixture worth watching.
One of those is a pathway. The other is a transfer window. Pick one, and say at what age it stops being the first and starts being the second.
