Increased focus on school sports development was a highlighted topic by the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) at the release of the 2016/17 transformation status report.
Although the federations have not invested significantly in school sports, the new report showed transformation progress by federations that have committed to the transformation agenda.
84% of all under 18 youths in the country are black. The EPG report found that school sport is the ultimate platform to transform South African sports from dominant representation to a majority reality.
The white dominated sporting codes were warned that they would not be sustainable if they continued to ignore the school structure pipeline.
“With the under 18 complement of our population white population traditional source of sports human capital reducing it means it’s disappearing. And the fact that the whites are only 3.5 million of the population if they do not exploit the large 80 percent population group amongst Black Africans they will run into sustainability problems. Some codes are already demonstrating that, bowls, swimming, tennis,” said EPG’s Dr Willie Basson.
It was also a concern that school sport in the townships and rural areas was ignored.
The department of Sports will revise the Sports Transformation Charter and weightings in the scorecards.
“We seem to agree with what the EPG is saying – that more weighting needs to go into development and school sports. So even if you do extremely well in other areas and you don’t perform well in school sports it will weigh you down because the realisation and recommendations is that federations tend to do high performance and ignore development,” said Sports And Recreation Director General, Alec Moemi.
In addressing the matter, a memorandum of understanding will be signed between the department of sport and the department of basic education.
It will address the challenges to introduce a coordinated and seamless school sport system and to improve access and delivery of school sport.
“We will invest in time resources and energies to making this program work better and to reach more school going children working with the department of basic education we hope that in the month of May we would have signed the agreement and critical for us is its implementation,” said Sports minister, Thokozile Xasa.
Rugby was the top performing federation from the five sports that were part of the pilot project in terms of transformation.
It surpassed the set barometer targets reaching a 60% mark.
