By Kaleigh de Jager
Palesa Matee, a first-year BEng (Civil Engineering) student at Stellenbosch University (SU), discovered she made the Junior Springbok Women’s squad the way most of her teammates did this year. She was at a University Sports South Africa (USSA) rugby tournament when she got added to a WhatsApp group and watched the congratulations roll in on Instagram before her own coach at Maties had said a word.
Sesethu Dumke, in her second year studying BA (Humanities), was a few rooms down and found out the same way – confused, scrolling, wondering why people were congratulating her for something nobody had told her about yet. She went and knocked on Matee’s door to check if she had seen it too.
Matee started playing rugby in Grade Nine, against her parents’ wishes. “They thought, ‘No, rugby is very dangerous. It’s only for men,’” she said. Her father wanted her on the soccer field instead.
Dumke’s introduction, in her Grade 10 year, at a high school sports day, went worse before it went anywhere: when her mother noticed her coming home exhausted instead of going straight to her books, she rang Dumke’s grandmother in the Eastern Cape to intervene, said Dumke.
“I got a phone call telling me I’ll hurt myself,” Dumke said. Neither mothers’ mind changed until results did – both mothers now show up proudly.
Both players trace a direct line from those early objections to a shared coach: Mr Qhamani Magodla, an English teacher and coach at Hector Peterson Secondary School in Kraaifontein, whose training sessions Dumke – whose own school had no functioning girls’ programme – simply invited herself to. “I felt welcomed in their team, even though I wasn’t attending their school,” she said.
Matee, in her first year balancing high-performance training with a degree, after two concussions, began questioning not just her body’s resilience but her place in the sport altogether, wondering if rugby “wasn’t made for her”. What talked her back was not a return-to-play protocol; it was her coaches repeatedly reframing injury as an ordinary cost of the game rather than a verdict on whether she should keep playing.
Dumke, in her own first year in the high-performance environment, described a similar low point. Living away from her family for the first time, combined with the collision of academic and rugby pressure last year, pushed her into genuine self-doubt about whether playing the sport was still what she wanted. Again, it was not any official channel that pulled her through it, but teammates and coaches who simply kept checking in and reminding her they were there.
What they describe, once they are inside the system, is a version of the men’s programme with the resourcing stripped. “Men will get more than what women get in the sport, professionally, even here at Maties,” Matee said.
Dumke put it more bluntly, saying kit and training slots are sometimes “leftovers from the male teams”.
Both point to last year’s under-18 international series against the Netherlands – South Africa’s first – as the moment that gap became public. Online commentary after the losses dismissed the coaching and the players as products of “politics”, criticism Matee called “mean and unfair” for a team fielded, by her account, with barely two to three weeks together before kickoff. “These things take time, and that’s what people should understand,” Dumke said.
Asked what would actually close the gap, neither player reached for a vague answer. Both want more women coaching, refereeing and in administration, and more pointedly, salaries that let a woman treat rugby as a career rather than something she funds with a second job. “The salaries must be enough for the woman to actually feel secure,” Dumke said.
Neither Matee nor Dumke plan to chase a long professional playing career; both say that they see themselves, in five years, on the development side, building the academy pathway for the next Palesa or Sesethu rather than occupying the jersey themselves.
It is a future they are already rehearsing in how they talk to young girls being told rugby is not for them. “Just do it,” Matee said. “Nothing is made for anyone. You have your own choices. You have your own rights.”
Dumke said, “Not everyone will always be on your side. But at the end of the day, you’re the person that’s going to live with whatever you’re doing.”
