Wynberg Rugby Festival

The Wynberg Rugby Festival opens the South African festival season each March, four days of rugby hosted by Wynberg Boys' High School in Cape Town's southern suburbs, where the season's first real answers are found weeks before the Easter gatherings begin. More than two thousand players descend on the fields of one of the country's oldest schools, founded in 1841, with the iconic Hawthornden and its mountain backdrop as the festival's centre stage.

The scale sets it apart. Across a single long weekend the programme runs to some ninety fixtures spanning U14 to U19, whole rugby programmes rather than first teams alone, with the Cape's traditional powers joined by visitors from across the country testing themselves before the season proper. For the hosts it is the front porch of their rugby year; for everyone else it is the earliest reliable measure of who has wintered well.

Under the Standard Bank banner the festival has grown into a fixture of the national calendar while keeping the character of its home: a proudly traditional school opening its gates, packed touchlines on the Hawthornden, and schoolboy rugby played hard in the shadow of the mountains before autumn has even arrived.