Academy Week

Academy Week is South African rugby's great second stage, run by SA Rugby alongside the U18 Craven Week each July and contested by provincial squads from every corner of the country. Its roots reach back to the Project Tournament of 1987, created to widen the doors of the provincial game, and the week has carried that purpose ever since: a national platform for players who missed Craven Week selection to prove the selectors wrong, and for the Country Districts unions and invited sides from as far as Zimbabwe and Namibia to test themselves at national level.

The two tournaments run side by side, often sharing a host town, with Academy Week typically fielding an even broader spread of teams than Craven Week itself. The stakes are real: strong performances move players between the weeks, and the composite side chosen at its close has historically fed directly into the SA Schools setup, once famously beating Italy as the SA Schools B team. Springboks have come this way, and every July more names are added to the list of players who used the week to force their way back into the pathway.

For the provinces it is a proving ground, and for hundreds of schoolboys each year it is the reminder that in South African rugby the road to the top has more than one gate.