Much more than just rugby

Windhoek Gymnasium shows their worth at the Capricorn Group 7's earlier this year.
Octavia Tsibes
Ju-Ané Oberholzer

During the weekend of the 8th and 9th of March, Windhoek Gymnasium hosted the annual Capricorn Group Rugby 7’s tournament, which delivered great rugby performance and is an event you do not want to miss. According to Tylo Blaauw, Miss Gym 2018, who helped with the handing out of the medals the planning and execution was without fault. “It was planned exceptionally well, there was nothing the organizers did not think about and everything happened smoothly.”

On Friday the spirit was high, as the rest of the school showed their support by dressing up silly and to raise awareness for the “Best dressed competition”. This year, a group of Grade 11 girls, namely, Marcha Klazen, Danielle and Georgia Steenkamp, Rhisdia van Wyk and Kayla Mouton, portrayed their creativity by showing up in their towels. Danielle explained that they are a group pf friends who like being silly and having fun. “My friends and I love doing fun and crazy things together because we hate taking anything too seriously, especially ourselves. We felt the need to dress up just to build a little spirit for the Sevens and just to have a little fun.”

International countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Germany, Botswana and Zambia took part against each other as well as our 2 Namibian teams in the International u/18 division. In the final, Namibia A team beat their own B team and took the bronze medal. South Africa won the International Cup Final by beating Germany, which allows them to keep their winning streak of the previous years as well. Germany still received their Silver medals with pride and huge smiles on their faces, and will, without a doubt, return to next year’s tournament. “It is something you need to experience. The amount of people you meet is unexplainable. It also builds the spirit of our school standing together and supporting our rugby teams who performed so well this weekend and made us Gimmies proud,”says Blaauw.

Michael Thuynsma, captain of the u/19 Rugby team, explained how his team was able to take the School’s division Cup. “We were mentally prepared, as we were an experienced 7’s team. It was my third year playing Capricorn 7’s u/18. Five schools took part in the School’s division, namely, HTS, WHS, Pro-Ed, Jan Mohr and the host school Windhoek Gymnasium. The u/15 Cup final winner was Windhoek Gymnasium, and this was their first Sevens tournament. Michael continued saying that they worked well as a team to take the win. “We played really well, taking first place, although we lost one game, we managed to make it to the final and win!”

This annual event is definitely an event with a bright future! The school hopes to have more people to partake in the ‘Best dressed’ competition with hopes to win the cash prize and more schools to enter to be a part of the tense competition. Whatever the reason, make sure you do not miss it next year! Who knows, maybe countries such as Japan or USA will also start competing?