Standing on the sideline and cheering for your team is a special joy when you’re a surrogate supporter, happy to play your part in developing the game of rugby.
By Antoinette Muller
When people ask me when I’m going to have kids, I tell them I’ve already got about 50 of my own. No, I’m not a compulsive adopter, in the mould of Angelina Jolie. I’m a surrogate rugby supporter.
The kids I’m proud to call my own play for the Connect Sports Academy, a rugby academy with roots in Khayelitsha. I stumbled on the academy by chance. In my job as a sports writer, I had written about the amazing work they do.
On a balmy February evening at Villager’s Rugby club, my partner and I went to watch Connect play a touch fixture. I was head over heels. Back then, most of the kids in the programme had only just started playing the sport.
Now, little over a year later, they are competing and winning against teams from Wynberg, Stellenberg, SACS and Rondebosch.
What Connect does is exceptional, and while they have all the coaching, transport and nutritional structures in place to make the programme a success for the kids, there is one thing that is notably absent. Support on the sidelines.
The parents of the children in the programme often spend their weekends working or do not have the means to get to matches. While Connect does try to make vehicles available to parents, it’s a costly affair and isn’t always in the budget. We counter that by being surrogate supporters.
Being a surrogate supporter means pitching up and cheering for 50 kids with the same amount of enthusiasm and bias that you would your own little ones. It means getting up at 5am on a chilly Saturday to pile into the back of a seatless Avanza, squeezed inbetween apples, sandwiches, chips rugby balls, cones and kit bags.
The trip to the venue often involves a detour trip to Khayelitsha – 40km out of Cape Town – en route to Paarl, Fish Hoek or some other obscure place across the Cape Peninsula when playing away games.
The amount of energy small people have so early in a Saturday never ceases to amaze me. As the sun starts to burn off the winter chill and the first whistle blows, surrogate support becomes an intense and sometimes thankless task. Between the biased cheering, much of the sideline time is spent making sure the water bottles are filled – the coaches are too busy coaching and the players too busy cheering.
Other times, you have to help small children tumble out of their shorts and boots to swap with a teammate, because not everyone has a pair and those that do might have forgotten to bring theirs. Tears flow too. Nor because of a rugby related injury, but because small children apparently just cry sometimes, another foreign concept for somebody who does not have children.
But in the few brief moments where the chaos subsides and the euphoria of a win engulfs you, it’s a special moment to share with these kids, and a glimpse into just how much rugby talent is waiting to be unleashed in this country.
- This article first appeared on the Change Exchange, an online platform by BrightRock, provider of the first-ever life insurance that changes as your life changes. The opinions expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of BrightRock.
