Craven Week U13

The U13 Craven Week is where South African rugby begins. The youngest of SA Rugby's national Youth Weeks, it gathers the country's best primary school players into provincial sides each winter, most of them pulling on a representative jersey for the very first time, and sets them against one another over five days in the same provincial format as the famous U18 week whose name it shares.

Like its senior sibling, the tournament crowns no official champion. There is no points log and no final; fixtures are seeded day by day, and by the closing morning the strongest provinces find one another in the showpiece matches, with Western Province and the Blue Bulls perennial contenders and unions from Namibia and Zimbabwe regularly joining the field. Hosting rotates among the country's great rugby schools, from Selborne College and Glenwood to Grey College in Bloemfontein.

Its role in the South African pathway is written in the record books. Dozens of future internationals played their first representative rugby at the U13 week, Os du Randt and Victor Matfield among them, and every year scouts, coaches and proud provinces watch the youngest Craven Week knowing they are seeing the Springboks of the 2030s in their first national colours.