Super boost for Baby Boks
SARU have thrown their weight behind the Baby Boks, doing everything they can to ensure that South Africa take their rightful place at the helm of international junior rugby in the future.
SARU Chief Executive Jurie Roux explained that they were forced to take stock of the situation following some underwhelming performances at the Junior World Championships in recent years, and have subsequently made a few key adjustments in an effort to give coach Dawie Theron and the team the best chance of success.
He said: “We used to dominate at the U19 and U21 level, but now for the last couple of years we haven’t won anything and it seems like everybody thinks that we are inferior when it comes to junior rugby when we are not.
“We know that we have got the best school systems, the best Super Rugby teams and probably the best national team as well but in between we are kind of losing it which is why we have been working on a long term strategy.
“We decided almost a year ago on the path we were going to take for the next Junior World Cup. We had Dawie [Theron] in the seat for the first time, it was a new journey and he didn’t have a lot of time to prepare his team and he didn’t have a lot of players available at that stage due to the systems within South African rugby, but we have had a look at all of those systems and recitified all of those processes, policies and procedures and Dawie now has a team available to him that he wants to choose,” added Roux.
The SARU boss said that the most important aspect of the new long term strategy for the Baby Boks’ success was to ensure that the needs of the team were prioritised, which means that young stars like Johan Goosen and Steven Kitshoff will now be available for selection despite already starring at Super Rugby level which was not always the case in the past.
He said: “In terms of South African rugby policies and procedures we have got a certain running order of teams and we had to ensure that the U20 side moved up in that order. That means that Dawie has got first right to them in selecting them for the junior tournament, and those are the policies that had to change.”
Roux said that although the structure of South African rugby does not allow them to take the same measures as some of the other countries, he is confident that the positive working relationship that Theron has with the provincial unions will contribute to improving the quality of performances on the field.
He explained: “On the staffing and general support of the team we are up against it in terms of the other teams in the world, especially the European teams who get their teams together and train for six months in a designated area by themselves to prepare that team on their own.
“They pay those unions for that and they take them out of the loop for any other competition. We don’t have that luxury at the moment, we have got the Varsity Cup Young Guns competition, the Vodacom Cup and Super Rugby as it stands at the moment so we can’t pull all of those players but we do have a good relationship with the unions.
“A lot of that good relationship has got to do with Dawie actually meeting with the younger coaches and also the Super Rugby franchise coaches to build a relationship so that everybody understands that we are not working against each other, in the end we are working for the greater good of South African rugby,” said Roux.
