What shaped three Springboks, and what shaped you?
NEWSLETTER 005
12 October 2026
Bloemfontein
Ox Nché grew up in Bloemfontein and went to HTS Louis Botha, never one of the city's celebrated rugby schools. Years earlier the same school had produced Daan Human, who played four Tests for the Springboks and then 169 games over eight seasons at Toulouse in France, winning two Heineken Cups. When Human came home and moved into coaching, he took Nché under his wing at the Cheetahs from the age of eighteen and stayed with him for the better part of a decade, all the way into the Springbok scrum that Human now runs. A Black African loosehead and an Afrikaans coach, two old boys of the same Bloemfontein school, building one scrum across ten years. In 2025 Nché became the first prop in the game's history to be nominated for World Rugby Player of the Year.
Malcolm Marx grew up in Germiston, raised by a single mother, and came through the King Edward VII School pipeline and the Lions academy. He didn't begin as a hooker. He played in the back row until a coach saw what he might become in the front row and moved him there in his final year.
Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu's grandfather, Barry Feinberg, spent thirty years in exile as an anti-apartheid activist. In 2025, at Kings Park in Durban, his grandson scored thirty-seven points in a single Test against Argentina. Sacha has said, "I'm a product of what he fought for." The Western Province academy and the Stormers coaching staff brought him through, and the Springbok set-up caught him at exactly the moment a young flyhalf needs catching.
What to take from the story
Three players came by three different routes, and the book covers all of them with one sentence. "The set-up found them, the coaches developed them, the standards held them, and each, in turn, has been asked to build the one who comes next."
The routes were a school and an academy, a coach from the same school corridors, and a provincial academy with a franchise coaching staff. What the three share came after the routes, once each of them was inside. People arrive on a team by different roads. What holds them together is what the team asks of them once they're in.
These three stories, and two more, are in Chapter 1. The book is at paulsteenkamp.com/books.
The weather this week
We can work beside someone for years and never hear about the moment, or the person, that shaped how they work.
Monday Morning
One question for your team this week. Which moment from your formative years shaped how you work for the better? Share what feels right.
ONE SMALL
BRAVE THING
Tell two people on your team about a moment that shaped how you work. Go first. Then ask for theirs, and listen without trying to top it.
Paul Steenkamp Writer. Speaker. Builder.
If you've been wondering how to find the people your pipeline keeps missing, bring that question to a Stacked launch. There are four, and two of them are this week.
Tuesday 20 October → Exclusive Books, Somerset Mall → 6PM
Thursday 29 October → Exclusive Books, Rosebank Mall → 6.30PM
To book your place at any of them, go to paulsteenkamp.com/contact, click the book launch registration button, and tell us which one you're coming to.
I'd love to hear your answer to this week's Monday Morning question in person.
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