Rogue agents prey on kids with dodgy deals
Talent scouts in the carpark — the race to the bottom to secure young rugby stars.
Schoolboys as young as 14 are being lured by talent scouts offering “disgusting” deals that cost them their commercial rights for years.
Agents, including some purporting to be connected to NRL clubs across the Tasman, are increasingly desperate for the “Next Big Thing”.
But sport bosses have warned the players and their parents about being seduced by potentially unscrupulous agents, who are sometimes making clandestine postmatch approaches in school carparks.
Deals offered to rising talent include trips to Australia and thousands of dollars in sweeteners — but also lock the boys into contracts for as long as six years.
Rugby Players’ Association boss Rob Nichol warns players and parents to be wary before putting pen to paper.
“The big worry we have is young kids and their parents getting carried away and committing to an agent on terms that are completely
unreasonable,” he told the Herald on Sunday.
“We’ve got kids signing five, sixyear agency agreements. Our belief is no kid at school should sign any agency agreement.”
Nichol is also calling on schools to be vigilant. The sight of talent scouts lining the sidelines at major school rugby clashes is becoming more common.
Details are difficult to pin down but the Herald on Sunday has learned that deals in the upper range might include club visits in Australia, a few thousand dollars and, in the case of Roger Tuivasa-Sheck before he signed with Sydney Roosters, the promise of moving the family.
At the lower end, however, kids are being signed to agents for a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of gear and the vague promise they are “on the radar” of a club.
It is a process one agent described as “whitebaiting”, in that you scoop up as much talent as possible and it doesn’t matter if the odd one falls out along the way.
“I don’t sign an agreement that binds me to my accountant, so why on Earth would the New Zealand education system be comfortable about kids at school signing six-year agreements with someone giving them the rights to commercialise a minor,” one agent said.
“It’s absolutely disgusting. The rugby league agents that come in are a real worry in that sense.”
Nichol has sounded the warning as part of the Herald’s The Book of Rugby series exploring rugby’s place in the national psyche.
Nichol was anxious to point out that school sport is an overwhelmingly positive experience and teaches kids many things, like resilience and camaraderie, that are hard to learn in a classroom.
But the increasing importance of school sport, particularly rugby, has dragged many of the less welcome aspects of professionalism through the gates. Player agent Daniel Kane, who works for global player management firm Esportif, said the reality was that they were working in a competitive market with finite resources.
“No question about it. Nobody calls you. You’ve got to be proactive,” he said of the search for talent. Esportif are accredited agents who are allowed “through the front door of schools”, but he said plenty others preferred the back-door approach and that was a concern for everyone in the industry.
“The NRL is the biggest concern. They’re aggressive,” Kane said. “They’re targeting even below the 1st XV level. They’re securing these families and that’s when the agency commitment comes in.”
Geoff Moon, the coach of last year’s national champion Mt Albert Grammar side said it was not uncommon to see agents approaching parents after games.
“We have rugby league looking for 14-year-olds in schools, trying to tie them up until post-school. We have rogue agents in the sidelines, talking to naive parents in the carparks.
“Professional rugby has put the race for talent a lot younger. League, as a result, has gone ridiculously young,” he said.
Replacing clubs as the breeding ground for talent has created issues that most schools are illequipped to deal with. In the second chapter of his Book of Rugby series, Dylan Cleaver warns the scramble for control of the schoolboy game could become New Zealand rugby’s biggest battle.
In the middle of a grey May day, in the middle of a long working week, Auckland Grammar 1st XV wing Rodney Tongotea received the ball with nothing on. Seconds later, he was diving into the corner to score the first try of the game, having bumped off three overmatched New Plymouth Boys’ High School defenders.
It would not be the last time Tongotea would spectacularly interrupt more sedate proceedings with an astonishing combination of speed and power.
In days gone past, that would have been the talk of the school the following day and would probably have earned the teenager a mention in school assembly. Big deal. For many ambitious kids, the conversation is relevant only if it spreads beyond the school gates; more specifically, to the personnel departments of the country’s professional franchises and unions.
Schools have replaced clubs, and in many cases provincial unions, as the battleground for talent identification and development. That, unsurprisingly, has created a raft of issues most schools are ill-equipped to deal with.
“Professional issues have now been brought into the school grounds,” says Geoff Moon, head of rugby at Mt Albert Grammar.
The glamorisation of schoolboy rugby has been ramped up with widespread television and streamed coverage, while websites and Facebook pages ranking players and schools has highlighted the sector’s increasing “professionalisation”.
“The story of college rugby’s ascension to prominence is really the story of club rugby’s struggle for relevance,” says commentator Scotty Stevenson, one of the game’s more astute modern thinkers. “The schoolboy game has become the breeding ground for professional players in the same way the premier club game was once the proving ground for provincial representation.
“Contracting is now a schoolboy issue. Super Rugby teams, through stipend relationships with provincial unions or academy programmes, have by and large circumvented the traditional club pathway. More and more, players are aware of the need to shine at a younger age. To do so, they seek schools that provide them with the best chance to be noticed.”
The best schools have become talent factories that supply our professional franchises with a seemingly endless source of worldclass athletes. On the flip side, some schools have become obsessed with the idea of a strong 1st XV, triggering a chain reaction where elitism is fostered and less wealthy schools simply stop trying to compete.
Talent spotters and player managers have become a constant on the sidelines and not all are beneficent presences, raising the expectations of kids and parents and, in some cases, inducing them to sign agency agreements that are possibly unethical and often disadvantageous to the athlete.
“Our belief is no kid at school should sign any agency agreement,” says Rob Nichol, head of the New Zealand Players’ Association, which has been instrumental in introducing an accredited agent scheme to try to keep unscrupulous operators out of schools.
“The big worry we have is young kids and their parents getting carried away and committing to an agent on terms that are completely unreasonable. We’ve got kids signing five-, six-year agency agreements.
“I don’t sign an agreement that binds me to my accountant. I don’t sign an agreement that binds me to my lawyer. So why on earth would the New Zealand education system be comfortable about kids signing six-year agreements with someone giving them the rights to commercialise a minor? It’s absolutely disgusting,” says Nichol.
The most voracious representatives were those claiming to be connected to NRL clubs, said most of those talked to by the Herald on Sunday.
“We have rugby league scouts looking for 14-yearolds in schools, trying to tie them up until post-school. We have rogue agents on the sidelines, talking to naive parents in the carparks,” says Moon, who said he welcomes accredited agents at MAGS “because they walk through the front door, not slip in through the back”.
“Professional rugby has put the race for talent a lot younger. League, as a result, has gone ridiculously young.”
As the competition for signatures has gotten younger (scouts or agents are routinely spotted on the sidelines at the national AIMS tournament for intermediate schools), it has also become haphazard. The welfare of the athlete has become secondary to the act of securing signatures itself.
Feeding frenzy might be a loaded term but there are sharks out there looking for the next helping of talent, say even those who could themselves be called predators.
“The NRL is the biggest concern,” says Daniel Kane, a talent manager at global agency Esportif. “They’re aggressive. They’re targeting even below 1st XV level. They’re securing commitments from families and taking them out of the rugby environment.
“We call it the whitebaiting scenario: you might scoop a lot up, but a lot still falls out along the way.”
Moon has seen it all. A South Aucklander by birth and attitude, he has progressed from the Struggle Streets of Mangere to the more leafy surrounds of Mt Albert. At MAGS, which counts Bryan “Beegee” Williams, Olo Brown and Sonny Bill Williams among its famous rugby sons, expectations are high.
Last year, as director of rugby and the coach of the 1st XV, he delivered, winning the ferociously competitive Auckland 1A competition and the national championship. He says, however, that what defines success for him and what defines it for many of the parents of kids at his school differs wildly.
“For us, it’s about giving the boys a love of rugby that will keep them in the sport forever,” he says in the chaotic Portacabin that serves as his office. “Whether they kick on and go professional, or to club, coaching, administering or supporting, we’ve got a role at this age group to give them a heartbeat for the game.
“That’s a major priority here. We focus
“We have rogue agents on the sidleines, talking to naive parents in the carparks.” Mt Albert Grammar head of rugby Geoff Moon
on the fun and enjoyment. The friendships. Love for your school. All the tangible stuff. If you love your school and you love your sport, man, you’re going to do well in the classroom, too.”
That philosophy means he is prepared to ride out “down” years as his team travels the rollercoaster of strength and weakness. That puts him into conflict with those who see other schools circumvent that cycle by “importing” talent to fill the gaps and implore him to do the same.
“The win-at-all-costs belief is more in parents than kids,” Moon says.
When MAGS don’t win, Moon and his school-first policies have come under attack from parents who feel their son’s progress along the professional pathway has been stunted. While Moon says he now has “fantastic buy-in” from parents and alumni, it took time.
“I’ve been here five years and have had conflict all right,” he says. “But you have to have a philosophy and stick to it. Don’t deviate. We had a great season last year and won everything, but it took three or four years, and it took three or four years of a lot of people challenging what we were doing. For us, it was about what ‘right’ looked like.”
What “right” looks like is a neat line. It is also interpretative. What becomes clear is that what “right” looks like to Rosehill College in Papakura might be fundamentally different to what it means on the moneyed lawns of St Kentigern College, Pakuranga.
Those two schools were not plucked out of the hat, either. All Black captain Kieran Read was a Rosehill boy until tempted to leave on scholarship to the independent St Kents. As it turned out, Read preferred the public system and soon returned to Papakura, but many more — such as Jerome Kaino, another Papakura boy — don’t.
New Zealand’s continued dominance as a rugby nation is partly attributed to its egalitarian appeal, so any trend towards it becoming a rich man’s playground is looked upon with suspicion. The rise of the independent schools is ruffling feathers in some quarters and inducing weary resignation in others.
“The complexities of school sport are huge,” says Kelston Boys’ High School principal Brian Evans. “It’s going to be a massive issue for New Zealand sport in the next 10 to 20 years. There was a time when you would get All Blacks out of [lowdecile state schools]. I think that will become a thing of the past, unfortunately.
“Sport is simply dying in some schools. It’s expensive and they don’t have the resources to compete, so they give up — and I am not going to sit here and blame them.”
Kelston sits in a low-decile league heartland in West Auckland but has maintained its presence among the big rugby schools because of a tie-up with Auckland’s most successful club, Ponsonby, and its willingness to throw resources at the sport because it provides a genuine career path for their students.
Without that commitment to rugby, and sport in general, Evans admits his programmes would be at the mercy of the independent schools who can offer scholarships that are marketed as six-figure prizes to struggling parents, and the promise of the best facilities school sport can offer.
It is an intoxicating message many parents cannot afford to ignore.
“It’s just not a level playing field any more,” Evans says. “How do the other schools keep up? Should they even try to? It’s so complex.
“You look at the All Blacks now and they’re still from all over the place but I can see a time when they won’t be. Rugby will become an elite schoolboy game. I have a feeling we’re already on this pathway.”
Like everything to do with the boom in the importance of schoolboy rugby, all that glitters is not gold. At one point, MAGS banned television cameras from their grounds.
“We said no to First XV TV because we wanted to wait until the parents’ expectations aligned to reality,” Moon says.
“When you have a TV game every now and then, like with Sky, it’s a learning experience. When it’s every week, you’re getting ahead of your station. You get the kids worrying about their haircuts and their celebrations rather than worrying about their homework. It can hinder development.”
Although New Zealand’s schoolboy talent is most densely concentrated in Auckland, this is not an Auckland issue.
In Canterbury recently, principals railed against what they described as an out-of-control local competition that was becoming professionalised, to the detriment of the competition and the athletes.
The principals said the schoolboy “arms race” was counter-productive. Not only was the “professionalisation” of schoolboy rugby undermining the values that schools were meant to be promoting, but it was not creating better kids or better players.
While the last point might seem counter-intuitive, Moon agrees.
“In the ’90s, we produced better players in the secondary school space,” he says. “The competition was even. There were limited scholarships. You went to your school and that’s who you played for. There’s not as many good players coming out of school as there was in the ’90s.”
Perhaps the reality is that this point alone will eventually encourage New Zealand Rugby to intervene and regulate.
Not because some schools are placing ludicrous stock in the performance of their 1st XV and not because of the pressure and expectation this puts on the players and their families, but because the uneven playing field will end up producing less players of quality.
That wonderful machinery that has supplied New Zealand’s professional franchises and, ultimately, the All Blacks could start to splutter.
Stevenson believes New Zealand Rugby’s battle to gain control of schoolboy rugby will be a Waterloo of sorts.
“It could be,” he says, “the defining battle of the coming decade.”
“There was a time when you would get All Blacks out of [low-decile schools]. I think that will become a thing of the past.” Kelston Boys’ High principal Brian Evans