One of the biggest bugbears of South African sports fans has been the issue of forced quotas being introduced into team selections. Fourteen years after our becoming a fully fledged multiracial democracy, the next generation of sportsmen and women are available for selection on merit to our club and national sides.
If we allow politicians to interfere in our sports we are not only falling foul of most international sports bodies ranging from FIFA to the IOC and even the ICC, but we are in addition allowing money designated for grassroots to find “a home” elsewhere. The basis for this is that if sports bodies can select tokens to attain “transformation” they will not be forced to explain why in a country where the population is in excess of 70% black, we have so few black sportsmen coming through.
Demographics alone should mean that if you are committing the resources to grassroots level development, then the percentages should favour a majority of black players in the squads.
Without pointing the finger at individual sports, far too much money is being squandered while administrators call for tokens to be included in national teams. If that organisation opened its books to public scrutiny they would come up woefully short on grassroots expenditure. This is where the focus needs to be.
South African rugby is fortunate that the South African Rugby Legends Association took the initiative and embarked on their programmes at grassroots level.
All the Springboks of the past and those coming off the production line are involving themselves in clinics and community based projects to dig out the jewels hiding away in our underprivileged community. This will produce players from all communities for the future, based upon merit and not tokenism.
The work of two of our writers Gavin Varejes and John Allan (Scotland and South Africa) in starting SARLA and taking it to the levels where it is today cannot be overstated. At enormous cost in both time and money, they dragged the project off the ground screaming.
Today it has sent over 35 000 youngsters through clinics, is launching Legacy Parks and is building the platform for the next generation of players and individuals through lifestyle courses.
If more South Africans could find the time and effort to build bridges and resources for the future as these two have done the country cannot do anything but prosper.
As Obama says:
YES WE CAN!
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