Boks get a serious schooling in preparation

Okay, so here's your starter for ten.

Which rugby team has a high performance centre, a biokineticist who ensures players are in peak condition, the latest video analysis at its disposal, a physiotherapist who is available daily and international coaches who are used on a consultancy basis?

It could be a Premiership club. But it's not even a senior club – it's a school.

To be precise, it's Maritzburg College in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It's the school at which current Bath Rugby players Butch James and Pieter Dixon learnt the game. And it sounds like a young rugby player's dream.
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As the limping, tarnished Springboks prepare to hobble into Twickenham this weekend following their ignominious loss to Scotland and two failed drug tests, Maritzburg College is a reminder of just how seriously South Africa takes its rugby.

You know the college takes a professional approach to the game when its website states that the school is sponsored by the local Renault dealership.

Moreover, Maritzburg appointed a full-time rugby administrator in 2009. "His role," says the website "is to scout talent and to keep the school at the cutting edge of technology through video analysis and up-to-date coaching courses."

Reading that, you wouldn't fancy sending your 15-year-old son on his school rugby trip to KwaZulu-Natal, would you? Sounds like you'd be sending a lamb to the slaughter.

It makes a bit of a change to school rugby in my day. Our rugby master had once enjoyed some representative honours but his view of analysis was to scream at us whenever there was a knock-on. Similarly, I doubt he went on any sophisticated coaching courses, despite the school having a proud rugby tradition.

The tale of Maritzburg College's rugby department says much about how the game has developed in the past 20 years. I remember reading in Lawrence Dallaglio's autobiography how he was once forced to lug all his boarding school kit from one side of school to the other after being dropped off at the wrong end.

"That," he wrote, "was the only weights I did until the game went professional". Those aren't his exact words, but they capture the gist.

The 'strength and conditioning' culture of professionalism has now clearly filtered down to schools and Maritzburg College is evidently proud of the environment it fosters.

Its website continues: "Outside specialists are brought in regularly to address coaches on specific issues, whether from a rugby, fitness, conditioning, nutritional or refereeing perspective.

"Our High Performance Centre is run by a biokineticist, who ensures that systems are in place whereby boys are regularly monitored with regards to fitness and strength conditioning."

Almost as a cocky afterthought, it adds: "Mark Steele (Springbok conditioning coach and an Old Boy) has been used on a consultancy basis."

If those are the resources that go into a school rugby team, then imagine the resources the Springboks have at their disposal. The story of Maritzburg College is one that all England fans should bear in mind as South Africa arrive at HQ. These Springboks are serious about their rugger.