Kenya’s youngest top rugby referee is a big hit

He is a 16-year-old Form Three student who stands no taller than five feet, four inches but in refereeing a rugby fixture, he is a giant of the game.

That is a knock-on and everyone knows it. A rugby ball should not be picked that way after it hits the ground and so the referee orders a restart.

This provides an interesting moment in the semi-final clash between Catholic Monks, the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA) rugby team, and Makueni RFC.

The referee blows his whistle as he stretches his left hand towards the Monks side. That means there will be a scrum.
Scrums, for rugby dummies, are the ones where a team’s players form a wall of sorts then push another wall of players on the other side.

The ball is then thrown on the pitch in the middle of the two sides.

In the ongoing game, the scrum goes as expected and soon a Makueni player is charging to the other side. Makueni eventually wins the game.

The scene played out last weekend at Impala Grounds on Nairobi’s Ngong Road as teams fought for the crown in the second division of the Christie Sevens rugby tournament.

If not for his age, not many people would have noticed the referee — which is a good thing because one of the refereeing principles is that match officials should never be the centre of attention.

But something stood out about the game’s referee, Lorence Ishuga from Nakuru.

He is a 16-year-old Form Three student who stands no taller than five feet, four inches.

That a diminutive schoolboy is showing the way to heavily built men, some who are way older than him and who are playing professional rugby, is something that has been the talk of the town in local rugby circles for the last few months.

But from the look of things, Lorence — who is also a rugby player that recently earned a call-up to the national under-20 squad — will continue wowing observers.

His focus appears crystal-clear, his dedication to the sport comes out as unwavering and he pursues his interest in refereeing just as a tree’s roots probe into the soil in search water and minerals, and the people around him have noticed it.

“He has earned me as the parent, and the family in general, a lot of praise. He has lifted our name in the school and the family here in the estate. Even small children here desire to be like him,” his mother Joyce Nduku says.

Having raised Lorence and his three sisters single-handedly since the death of their father in 2006, Nduku, a tailor, hopes her only son will actualise his dreams.

And for Victor Oduor, a referee in the national rugby circles who is also the secretary of the Rift Valley rugby referees’ body, Lorence’s case is a revelation.

“If we can have more students who can come up like him, it can be a good way of showing how sports can mentor people from a tender age rather than starting after retiring,” he says.
Lorence, on his part, keeps dreaming.

“My aim is to one day do the Olympics final, because that’s the highest-rated competition in the world,” he says.

PREFERRED POSITION

On an ordinary day, Lorence oscillates between his home in Nakuru’s Pangani estate, one of the low income neighbourhoods in the town, and Nakuru Day Secondary School.

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, his evenings have more activity lined up. Those are the days he attends rugby trainings at the Top Fry grounds.

For close to six years, he has been in the Nakuru Top Fry Academy, the place where talent is nurtured to play for the Top Fry Nakuru RFC.

The team is among the forces in Kenya’s sevens rugby, having won the Mwamba Cup in 2016, emerged the national winners of the sevens circuit in 2015 and won the Kenya Cup in 2013 and 2014.

Besides his involvement in the Top Fry Academy, Lorence also plays for his school’s rugby team.

“I got the opportunity to play for the school’s senior team when I was still in Form One,” he says.

Even before he could join high school, Lorence had been introduced to rugby in 2010, courtesy of his Mathematics teacher at New Life Africa School, Felix Oloo, who is also a rugby coach.

“He was the one who told me, ‘Lorence, just come and join this sport.’ By then, I was very short; so even my mum was a bit worried when I started playing,” he says.

He adds: “We just started with a single ball and we were playing on a very bad field. We just got involved and after a year, our efforts bore fruit.”

In 2011, Lorence and 23 other pro-rugby boys at the primary school, which is run by a charitable non-governmental organisation, were taken to the United Kingdom on a 10-day trip.

“I think it gave us that psyche that through this game a person can go far. Many of the boys later went into senior clubs like Menengai Oilers.

In 2014, five of the boys managed to play for the Kenya under-15 team. Unfortunately, I was part of the reserve boys; I never made it to the team. But now I’ve earned a call-up to the Kenya under-20 team,” he says.

By the time he was sitting his Kenya Certificate of Primary Education examination in 2014, he was already conversant with rugby. His preferred playing position is the scrum-half or fly-half.

“That’s like a team’s playmaker, more like a midfielder in football,” he explains.

Does his small body size make him scared of playing the highly physical game?

“It’s the health that matters, not your body size,” he says.

But his mother at one time thought of separating her son from rugby forever. That was in 2014 when Lorence was in Standard Eight. On that day, he dislocated a joint in his left hand while playing.

“She was almost coming to the conclusion that I should stop playing rugby because in this game people are killed on the field,” Lorence says.

“But my coach convinced her that I needed to get back to the playground and assured her of my safety.”
Nduku explains to Lifestyle why she dreads rugby.

“In his first days of playing, I was full of fear. You know, rugby is not an easy sport. It is rough and someone can knock you deliberately.

Another one can injure you while going for the ball. So, a parent has to be scared,” she says, confessing that she has never gone to watch her son play.

That same year, Lorence would get his first refereeing experience. During a training at the Top Fry grounds, coach Oloo told him to take the whistle and officiate a game. At first he did not know how to react but he had to obey.

“I just took it positively and I refereed the game. After that, I developed some anxiety,” he says.

He capped the eventful 2014 with a score of 332 marks out of the possible 500 in the KCPE examination. That landed him at Nakuru Day Secondary School, an institution he admits he never liked at first.

In secondary school, he continued pursuing his interest in rugby, and he was lucky to discover that his primary school coach would still be his coach at Nakuru Day.

Now pursuing both playing and refereeing dreams, and with his coaches urging him to keep pursuing both, Lorence recently took lessons in refereeing. That is how he got clearance to officiate at the national rugby sevens circuit organised by the Kenya Rugby Union.

He is now having a level one rank in the refereeing circles, which is the entry qualification. The best referees in the game are on level three.

He had to sit some online exams administered by World Rugby to earn that accreditation.

“First, you need to do the online exams, and you have to score 100 per cent, then do a thing called Rugby Ready; just giving you what the game expects.

“After you’ve done that, there is a course that is held in a room for some few hours and also at the field for some few hours. You’re just basically introduced to the refereeing world — being told more about the referee and the assistant referee. After you’ve completed the course, you get accredited,” he says.

He adds: “Now I have a level one for officiating 15s rugby and also officiating 7s rugby.”

Oduor, the secretary of the Rift Valley referees’ body, says Lorence is currently among the approximately 25 referees from Nakuru.

Before a person is allowed to officiate local rugby matches, the official explains, they have to pass various tests administered by the regional referee organisations’ heads under the Kenya Rugby Union.

“You must be physically fit, so we have to administer fitness tests. And Lorence did very well in the fitness test and he performed better than some of the referees because he’s young,” says Oduor, who adds that prospective referees are also subjected to law exams three times in a season.

“Officials at the region manage everything. You just send the results to the mother body, Kenya Rugby Referee Society,” says Oduor.

Having impressed judges and received a chance to referee games, Lorence was involved as a match official in the Prinsloo Sevens in Nakuru on the weekend of September 23 and 24, the Sepetuka Sevens in Eldoret on the weekend of September 30 and October 1 then the Christie Sevens in Nairobi on the weekend of October 14 and 15.

In most of those legs, he has been involved as the central referee in second division matches and also as an assistant referee in the first division ones.

His highest moment in those outings, he says, is officiating the finals of the schools category at the Prinsloo Sevens.
Oduor says that being a rugby player will make Lorence a good referee.

“He knows the tactics that players normally use because he’s still playing. He understands the game better than somebody who hasn’t played at all,” Oduor says.
Lorence says he would like to always make the right decisions and that behoves him to be fit, keen and respectful.
Fitness helps him to be “close to the ball so that you can see the availability of the ball”.

“Sometimes some refs are not close to the ball so that they can see everything that is happening there. But at least when you’re close to the ball, you get to know what is happening and you cannot miss the offences,” he says.
Being keen enables one to make the right call and gesture every time, and that is the reason he feels he cannot referee a 15-a-side rugby game yet.

“In 15s rugby, you need to get that experience because the players are too many at the breakdown area; so it’s either you miss offences or sometimes you get confused on what to rule because the players are too many you cannot see anything,” he explains.

Respect, on the other hand, enables a referee take criticism positively when players complain.

“The losing team will always tell you, ‘Oh ref, why have you done this? It was a knock-on; you never called it.’ But I think it’s how you take yourself after that; how you accept the criticism from the players and you know how you’ll build yourself on the next level,” he says.

To ensure he masters the rugby rules, he has the rugby rule book and he also uses the internet regularly to keep abreast with the ever-changing rules of the game.

“Like there are six of them which have changed two months ago,” he says.

“One of them is that initially, at the tackle area, the tackler could just play the ball from any direction. But the new law says now the tackler needs to get back onto his or her side so that they can re-gather the ball,” says Lorence.

But even as he pushes the acceleration pedal on his sporting activity, the fact remains that he is still in high school and that next year, the Kenya National Examination Council will want to know what he has retained in the eight subjects he is taking that include geography and all the three sciences.

“He performs well both in studies and in academics,” his mother says. “Recently, there was a countrywide maths competition and he was position 33 out of 400 countrywide. He wakes up early to study and also stays up late to study.”
Lorence, whose secondary education is being sponsored by the NGO that funded most of his primary studies, aspires to study sports science in university.

“My expectation for now is that he himself realises his dreams and that he becomes a good example to the society so that everyone will want to be like him because of his habits,” his mother says.
Lorence has not made any money so far from his refereeing, save for travel allowances and other stipends.

“For now, I’m not after refereeing for money. I want to get that exposure, know the corrections that I need to make and maybe the weaknesses that I’ll need to work on,” he says.

Officiating in rugby, Oduor says, is not the best-paying job. He adds that one needs a regular Monday to Friday job.

“You get to travel a lot, meet people as well, and we enjoy it. We do it for the love of the game. So, we enjoy what we do and it gives us opportunities to go to places,” says Oduor, who is also one of Lorence’s mentors besides the youngster’s long-time coach and Nakuru-based rugby trainer Lameck Ongati.

As he takes in lessons from class and the field, Lorence is enriching his world-view one day at a time, and he hopes for an A-minus in next year’s KCSE examination and that he may one day earn the “firm but fair referee” description given to his role model, South Africa’s Fhatuwani Rasta Rasivhenge.