SA Rugby president Mark Alexander has addressed the lack of transformation at provincial level after only three unions managed to achieve the set targets last season.
According to a report on IOL, the majority of the local franchises and provinces who participated in last year’s Super Rugby, PRO14, Super Rugby Unlocked and Currie Cup had failed to achieve the set 45% representation for ‘generic black’ players and 22% for ‘black African’ players; with only the KwaZulu-Natal and Western Province Rugby Unions reaching the generic black target and only KZN and Eastern Province exceeding black African target.
In the SA Rugby annual report tabled this week, Alexander said: ‘When the success of transformation is determined by budget allocation, one must, unfortunately, ask the question whether it is a symptom of a system that has not changed at its core.
‘If the statistics are correct, we have a shrinking coloured and white player base in our country, and if we fail to attract the rest of the population groupings to our sport, we will have a small pool of players on which to draw.
‘Transformation asks for our business to be done differently; it is a process of fundamentally restructuring the very basis of our business with different priorities, and the reallocation of current resources that will contribute to a conscious, deliberate, planned, and goal-directed change with the sustainable growth of rugby being at the heart of it.
‘The enabler is not necessarily more money, but rather how we differently use the monetary resources that we have, smarter and more effectively.’
‘Continually advancing as part of a journey towards better representation is very important, with a long-term end-goal in sight, and the unions realise there is a need to improve their team demographics,’ read the report.
‘Contracting players was not as straight-forward in 2020 as under normal circumstances, due to the pandemic, and all the provinces realise that player contracting is a prominent contributing factor to meeting their self-determined transformation targets.’
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