Benny’s an inspiration for a nation!

Theo Garrun looks at Benny’s Sports Academy, and how they are turning out winning footballers.

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A wise editor I worked for years ago used to encourage us to get out of the office. “You’ll never learn anything about the real world if you sit at your desk all day,” Neville Adlam used to say.

So when the PR lady from the Danone Nations Cup soccer competition called on Thursday last week to ask if I could be in Rivonia at 5.30am the next day to go to Louis Trichardt to visit the 2016 champions, Benny’s Sports Academy, of course I eagerly said “yes”.

Well, not that eagerly, actually, because I knew it was going to be cold at that time of the morning, but I agreed anyway.

And, boy, am I glad I did. I get to choose which school sporting stories to pursue pretty much at will these days, and I generally opt for the glamour events, the high-performance schools and the high potential individuals.

It’s easy, I was reminded last Friday, to forget that there’s another side to the coin, and that it can be a source of inspiration.

It’s a soccer story, and one which reinforces what we all know: South Africa is doomed to soccer obscurity if we don’t get things right at grass-roots level.

Benny’s Sports Academy sounds like a First World centre of development where talented kids get world-class coaching and off-the-field support, but it isn’t. It’s a little school in a village called Tshiozwi, one hour out of Louis Trichardt, which is about as rural as you can get. And yet there’s greatness there, achieved on a gravel football pitch, in classrooms built with hand-made bricks and with children fed by women cooking on open fires in a grass-thatched hut.

Benny’s won the national title in this year’s Danone Nations Cup competition, so they will be going to the world finals in France in October, along with the winning schools from 31 other nations.

This was the third time they have been the Limpopo champions in the competition.

The school runs from Grade 0 to 12, so they have a high school too and the under-19 team have been provincial champions in the Kay Motsepe Schools Cup five times as well, which in that tournament means a total of R500 000 in infrastructure funding. The money has been put to good use in developing the educational facilities, including a new hall where we were served a great lunch cooked by those same women who cook for the kids each day.

They are battling there. One of the purposes of the visit, I found out, was to take the players food to supplement their diet. Danone filled a trailer with their products - yoghurt, Jungle Oats, energy bars and fruit juice - and bought a couple of crates of eggs, to hand over to the school.

So how come they shine so brightly? It’s impossible to know from a one-day visit, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t come down to leadership.

The school, it seems, is a hybrid private-public one. It’s owned by David Mufumadi (nickname: Benny), a Louis Trichardt furniture store manager who funds it largely out of his own pocket. The principal is Sindane Nqobile, and between them they clearly run a tight ship.

The coaches are teachers and the teachers (the matric pass rate is over 90 percent) are dedicated and hard-working.

“We are proud of the boys from here who have been picked up by scouts from professional clubs,” Mufumadi said. “But our aim is to keep the players in the area by creating our own club and eventually progressing into the national leagues.”

Before then, they are hard at work preparing 15 12-year-olds for Paris and the experience of their young lives.

An inspiring story. It was well worth getting up early on a chilly morning to see it all. - Independent Media