South African Teens Find New Passion in Scrabble Competition Program

Chuka Obidike learned Scrabble from his father. Now he is preparing to compete in his school’s first-ever formal Scrabble tournament, and that personal thread connects directly to something much larger unfolding across Johannesburg.

Scrabble South Africa has launched a five-year initiative to bring competitive Scrabble into South African high schools, with King Edward VII School (KES) and Parktown Boys’ High School the first two institutions to join. The programme’s opening training session took place on August 27 in an English classroom at one of the participating schools, marking the formal start of an effort years in the making.

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The project grew from grief and solidarity. After the death of Steven Gruzd, who served as deputy president of Scrabble South Africa, friends and fellow members of the Gauteng Scrabble association pooled resources to establish the initiative in his memory. Ike Obidike, president of Scrabble South Africa, led that first session himself and has been clear about the vision driving the work.

For Paul Marketos, the English teacher at KES who runs the school’s Scrabble club, the stakes are straightforward. Words, he argues, are the foundation of all communication. Scrabble builds vocabulary depth and strategic thinking at once, and Obidike echoes that view, describing the game as a tool for developing cognitive capacity alongside linguistic knowledge. The board demands decisions that go well beyond knowing what a word means.

By contrast, what has been missing until now is structure. High school competitions have simply not existed in the South African Scrabble landscape, despite the game’s clear educational value. This programme is designed to fill that gap, creating a pipeline from classroom play to something considerably more ambitious.

The competition will expand to six schools in total, with learners competing in under-15 and under-19 categories on October 31 for prizes. That date will serve as the first real test of whether the training translates into competitive engagement. Gauteng Scrabble players backing the initiative are open about their long-term hope: that South African youth will eventually compete at African and world championship level. School-level play, in their view, is where that journey begins.

Chuka Obidike’s enthusiasm (he is both a Scrabble and chess player) suggests the programme is already connecting with students who bring genuine passion to strategic games, not just those looking for an extracurricular activity to fill an afternoon.

The five-year commitment is the detail that separates this from a one-off event. Whether interest holds and deepens over the coming years, and whether any of these learners eventually represent South Africa on an international stage, remains the open question the programme was built to answer.