Begging Fields

by
Bate Felix

Lush, well-tended fields begging to be roughed up a bit. Bare courts, stadiums and sports halls.

A sad existence for Wits’ sporting facilities.

With more than enough sports grounds to hold the entire Wits population on a given day, it is heartbreaking to see these facilities empty most of the time.

Wits students don’t even seem to notice how fortunate they are to have Olympic-standard facilities that many a third world nation would go to war over.

Come evenings and weekends, the campus is deserted, the fields beg for a crowd, for cheering spectators to warm the benches, for studs to dig into the grass, for somebody to slide, to tumble . . .but alas.

A while back I used to long for such grounds - when my only playground was a dusty, rough patch of uneven earth, dug out of a side of a hill. But it nonetheless managed to become a place of great camaraderie. A place where characters were shaped, where life-long bonds were formed, and also some enemies.

When I first laid eyes on the immaculate lawns of the Digs field, of Sturrock Park, of Walter Milton oval and the Charles Skeen stadium, I thought this was surely a place where champions were moulded. Surely with such facilities, Wits should be producing top sportsmen and women, proportionate to the number of graduates…but alas.

No varsity Olympics, none of the intervarsity duels famous in other places, no inter-faculty games…The lack of such contests is unheard of in any other university worth the name. Not even the David Webster friendlies tournament, organised a few weeks ago, drew Witsies. Question is: are we just too busy or do we just not care? Or worse still, just lazy slobs put off by the abundance of sporting options we have?

Last I heard the varsity curriculum developers were considering introducing Sports (practice and theory) as a compulsory course with exams and compulsory hours, in all degree programmes.

This I believe is laudable. If it means taking these forceful measures to make students use sporting facilities, then so be it.