I trundled into Caledon on the now freshly graded road at about noon yesterday (Saturday) for a final meeting with Farouk to hand over completed documents and all my unused “tools of the trade”. I had just finished a lunch of Bobotie at Café Letta’s in the Spar centre when Farouk phoned to say he was approaching the town, which was a relief, since most of Caledon shuts down from midday on Saturday and I would have had to wait in a baking car. As it was, Paula, who now owns the Café, shut the doors behind me as I left!
My demobilisation complete, I drove back to Tesselaarsdal, but didn’t come home, driving instead to the incomplete “Sports Complex” just beyond. “Sports Complex” is more than a little flattering. A breeze-block building intended to be dressing rooms cowers in the bush, abandoned when it had reached door-height. Behind it, the bush crowds three sides of a cement tennis court which is unusable because one cement slab has broken up entirely, and the adjoining slab juts 10cm into the air. Fifty metres away through the bush, on the brow of a hill, is the dusty, molehill studded rugby or soccer field.
Interest engendered by the soccer team has spread to the women, who have entered the local Netball league, with little more than enthusiasm to work with. When word came earlier this week that their first match was to be played today, they had not practised as a team and had only one goal hoop anyway. Stephen hastily cobbled together a second hoop from scraps and a plough-share while the concrete rubble was cleared from the tennis court. Since there was neither time nor resources to repair the surface. Olympic rules were waived and a rather stubby, shortened court was marked out using congealed lumps of lime-wash from the rubbish tip.
Some of the older “Soccer Boys” have moved on to revive the Rugby team, and are leading the league in their first season. Play on both fields got underway – about an hour late – just after I arrived, and pretty soon the Tessies rugby team was running very dusty rings around the visitors. At day’s end, the Tessies “B” Team had won 14-0 while the “A” Team had trounced the visitors 59-0.
Tessies supporters look on as their new team concedes yet another point.
Things were not going as well on the dwarf-netball field though… The Tessies girls barely know the rules and are nowhere near fit, but found themselves up against a team from Greyton with an 18 year history. The “B” team scored an early goal – and never saw the Visitors’ hoop again. The visitors shooters passed the ball through the Tessies hoop fifteen times.
After a few minutes break, the women from Greyton took on the Tessies “A” team. I think they were the “A” team simply because some of the older women had actually played Netball at school! Perhaps that was why they managed to score two goals, both in the first half. The visitors incessant scoring took it’s toll though – on the hastily constructed goal-hoop! The match was considered truly won at 45 to 2 in the second half, when the Tessies hoop parted company from the pole!
Tessies Netball team after their first match, against a very experienced team from Greyton.
Perhaps the broken hoop should become a Floating Trophy!
People who live in cities with well-funded sports facilities take so much for granted. Out in the rural areas, simply getting to a venue is a major undertaking, thwarted by lack of funds for transport, complete lack of facilities and lack of knowledge about running an organisation.
It occurred to me that away from the hoopla about the Olympics, the Soccer World Cup and other headline grabbing sport, most of the world’s potential athletes have to battle this kind of hardship. The thing is that this is about more than sport – I am not a great sports fan, but I’ve seen how a little guidance has given indigent youth a new focus and how their enthusiasm has in turn re-vitalised a community. In the process of creating sports clubs from scratch people will simply have to learn other skills such as basic bookkeeping and event management, which can possibly be applied to creating their own employment opportunities. If nothing else, sport in small towns and villages can do a lot to counter the feeling of hopelessness and abandonment rife in many economically depressed communities.