Dimpho Kwayine Crowdfunds to Keep Rugby Dream Alive
Dimpho Kwayine’s rugby journey began on the stairs of a Soweto train station and now runs through the senior Western Province women’s team. At 21, she is a first-generation Geomatics student at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and this week she launched a crowdfunding campaign to keep herself in Cape Town, on the field and in the lecture hall.
The stakes are plain. “If it does not come through, I risk not being able to complete my degree and possibly having to move out of Cape Town and losing the ability to play for the Western Province,” she says.
The dream was lit at the U18 Girls Week in Welkom, where she watched Western Province from the sidelines. “I remember watching the final game. It was the Western Province and the Sharks. And both teams were so competitive. However, I loved the Western Province more because of how they were dominating the Sharks and obviously they won the game,” she says.
“From there I just knew, if I can’t play against them, if I can’t be on the field with them, then I definitely, like, I have to join them somehow.”
Western Province Rugby Player and Geomatics Student, Dimpho Kwayine
Kwayine had joined the Soweto Rugby Schools Academy at 15, months before the pandemic shut everything down. As the lockdown levels eased, she found her own training ground.
“Me, my sister, and the kids in my community, we would jog to this train station. It’s called Phomolong Station, and train there. So we would run up and down the stairs at the train station, do jump squats at the train station. And sometimes I would go with the rugby ball and meet some of my teammates there,” she says.
She moved to Cape Town in 2023, represented Western Province at U20 level in 2025 and earned a senior call-up after that year’s National Girls Week, aged 20. Her debut came off the bench on 14 March 2026 in Bloemfontein, where Western Province came from behind to beat Free State Women 38-21.
“I just remember struggling to breathe on the field. I was coming from the bench. I got subbed in. I think I played eight minutes,” she says. “The women played well. We were leading when I was subbed in, and we won the game.” What stayed with Kwayine was the company.
“I had never seen myself being on the same field as the Springbok Women, you know, the women who play for the Western Province and the Springboks at the same time.”
In October a call-up to the Springbok Women’s High Performance Assessment Camp run by SA Rugby followed, with gym twice a day. “I struggled a lot. But I eventually managed to push through until I re-injured myself in the camp,” she says. She is rehabilitating now.
She describes Geomatics as the science and technology of collecting, analysing and interpreting spatial information about the earth. “In high school I loved geography, I loved map work,” she says.
The degree has already been interrupted once. By her account, NSFAS funding awarded for her UCT studies was not received by the university, which became apparent as she entered her third year in 2025. Despite multiple appeals she was excluded for non-payment of fees, with the debt made her personal responsibility, and offered a restart at CPUT.
The middle child of three, raised by a single mother who is a retail worker, she is the first in her family at a tertiary institution.
Her BackaBuddy campaign seeks R648,350 to cover the UCT debt, three years of CPUT tuition and two years of accommodation, and gives South Africans a way to give in rand alongside a GoFundMe campaign in pounds endorsed by the UCT Ikey Tigers Rugby Club.
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If it works, 2027 looks like a second year at CPUT, an injury healed and a return to the field. She knows what a platform can do. “We need such a platform to help a young girl who’s in the township, a young girl in the rural area, to get those stories out there so that they can also get an opportunity to dream,” she says. Her own story is now one of them.
Main Photo Caption: Dimpho Kwayine made her senior Western Province women’s rugby debut off the bench against Free State Women in Bloemfontein on Saturday, 14 March 2026, three years after moving from Soweto to Cape Town to chase a place in the provincial side. The Geomatics student at CPUT has launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund her studies. All Photos: Supplied
Photo 2 Caption: Kwayine represented Western Province at U20 level in 2025 before earning senior selection for the 2026 season.
Photo 3 Caption: Kwayine attended the Springbok Women’s High Performance Assessment Camp run by SA Rugby in October 2026.
Crédito: Link de origem