Where our Olympians went to school

What school did you go to? It’s a common question – and if New Zealand’s Olympic athletes in Rio asked each other, they’d get a wide range of answers.

From Kerikeri down to Invercargill, 116 different high schools played a part in producing the 202 athletes who represented their country at the Rio Olympics.

They include 84 in the North Island and 32 in the South Island; 86 state schools, 17 state integrated schools, and 13 private schools; 24 boys’ schools, 24 girls’ schools and 68 co-ed schools.

Auckland Grammar School and Hamilton Boys’ High School each produced eight, more than any other, while seven others produced four or more. Sixty-one schools can each claim a single Rio Olympian, while 34 have two, and 12 have three. Six athletes did not attend high school in New Zealand.

The smallest school to play a part was Solway College in Masterton, home to just 137 students, and at one time, dressage rider Julie Brougham. The largest is Auckland’s Rangitoto College, which helped produce sailors Alex Maloney, Daniel Willcox and Gemma Jones, and cyclist Georgia Williams, and has more than 3000 students.

Christchurch’s Burnside High School, the country’s fifth-largest school, is the biggest not to have anyone in Rio, so far as we could find. There are 12 others among the top 50 largest in the same position.

There were five students from three Diocesan schools; 17 from nine schools with Saint in their name; and 18 from ‘‘ Grammar Schools’’. There were 29 from ‘‘Boys’ High Schools,’’ and 19 from ‘‘Girls’ High Schools’’.

Christchurch gymnast Courtney McGregor, who was 17 as she competed in Rio, was the only one we found who relied on Correspondence School, and that was only after leaving Villa Maria College.

Where our Olympians went to school lines up neatly with where New Zealanders live, give or take a few percentage points here and there. The biggest outlier appears to be the Bay of Plenty. That was where 8.67 percent of New Zealand’s Olympians were schooled, but it is home to just 6.25 percent of the nation’s population.

Perhaps then, that is why it is also the country’s most successful region, in terms of medals won.

Mahe Drysdale, Peter Burling and Sam Meech, winners of two gold medals and a bronze, all hail from Tauranga Boys’ College – the single most successful school – while double medallist Lisa Carrington (a gold and a bronze) is from Whakatane High School, silver medallist Luuka Jones is from Otumoetai College, and silver medallist Molly Meech is from Bethlehem College. All told, 32 high schools can claim a Kiwi medallist from the Rio Olympics.

If there’s any conclusion to be drawn from all of this, it’s that it doesn’t matter where you start out – people have come from all over New Zealand and made it to Rio,

QUALITY NOT QUANTITY

Avondale College Hamilton Boys’ s’ High School ol and so it should be again in the years to come. On Tuesday, August 9, at John Paul II High School in Greymouth textbooks and pencil cases were put aside, with everyone’s eyes instead transfixed on TVs beaming pictures from Rio, where former student Ruby Tui was playing for New Zealand in the women’s sevens final.

Tui was head girl in 2009 and is still the pride of the school, which has a roll of less than 200, making it one of the nation’s smallest.

She played a bit of rugby and sevens while at school, then, as principal Kieran Stone puts it, Westlake Boys High School Auckland Grammar School Tauranga Boys’ College ‘‘next thing we knew she was in the New Zealand team’’ and the school’s first Olympian.

‘‘I think my last words to her were ‘carry on with sport’, but I always thought she was going to do something in cycling or netball; she was starting to test the waters in terms of triathlon,’’ he says.

The school has kept in touch with Tui while she was in Rio, with students so endearing that they cut out pictures of her and stuck them on their faces so ‘a team of Rubys’ sent messages of support.

‘‘I texted Ruby early in the piece; our attendance officer keeps tabs on her and gives her a bit of cheek now and then,’’ Stone says

‘‘And she’s on Facebook so the kids were jumping on there and having a look at pictures and sharing a few messages.’’

Screens were set up in classrooms for everyone to cheer her on in the gold medal match.

‘‘Classes pretty much stopped for the final, which was good. We were posting the times for their games on the intranet and things.

‘‘It was lovely – to have somebody in the Olympics is pretty special.’’

The school will be abuzz upon Tui’s return to the region, where she is likely to feature at an assembly and provide some inspirational words, as well as showing off her silver medal.

It’s some effort for the school to catapult a student onto the world’s biggest sporting stage, and Stone has some quick-witted reasoning for it.

‘‘We of course don’t go for quantity, we go for quality,’’ he says.

‘‘The kids love their sport here and we encourage them to get involved in things. It just seems to be what they do on the West Coast.’’

Stone says it doesn’t matter where kids go to to school – that if they want to get to the top then they can. But he does realise the need for youngsters to test themselves against stronger competition.

‘‘If students are good at sports, especially the mainstream sports, they can be talent spotted throughout New Zealand, it doesn’t really matter which school they go to,’’ he says.

‘‘But then it’s making sure they’ve got the competition and so forth. So some students will leave the coast . . . and sometimes we’ll organise that for students.’’

FINDING THE BALANCE

Hamilton Boys’ High School had eight Olympians at Rio, and deputy headmaster Nigel Hotham, who oversees the school’s sports programme, saw all of them come through.

He had the most to do with rugby sevens players Joe Webber and Regan Ware, but a common theme across the group was the way they were able to handle the juggling act that is schoolwork and sport.

‘‘Obviously there’s a real focus at the school about trying to get that balance,’’ he says.

‘‘The thing with sport is it’s such a time-consuming activity when you’re operating at that level. So definitely they’re students that worked very hard in the classroom.

‘‘But some of the credit has to go to the staff here. I think at some schools there’s the feeling that school is just about the classroom and anything else you’ve just got to fit in around it. Definitely at Boys’ High the staff sign on to the fact that some of these boys are going to go on, like these eight boys, to be Olympians, or professional athletes.’’

Hotham says allowing boys to embrace their sporting dreams is important, so they offer plenty of support in busy times.

‘‘Certainly my experience with the staff here is that they bend over backwards to support the boys and make sure they manage their time well and get through those tough periods where the challenge is between fulfilling their responsibility to the cocurricular programme, while still maintaining high academic standards.’’

It’s times like the Olympics where Hotham and others at the school get an overwhelming sense of pride, sitting back and watching these guys they knew as kids footing it with the best on the biggest stage of all. ‘‘It’s fantastic,’’ he says. ‘‘We’ve been streaming the Olympics in the hall at lunchtime. Just the Olympics is special, but when there’s an old boy involved, it just adds another very special level to that excitement of watching and supporting the New Zealand teams.’’

As the saying goes, success breeds success. It’s that intangible aspect which can’t be taught – the inspiration kids draw from Olympic stars.

Hotham said that as the games drew closer, they acknowledged at assemblies the crop of old boys who would be competing. He said many of this group already put plenty back into the school, and their willingness to continue that would be invaluable.

‘‘They are role models for others, and there’s some wonderful stories about young men that sit in an assembly hall and listen to someone speak or hear the headmaster speak about old boys, and are inspired by that to go on and do something similar themselves.’’

Big or small, from north to south, schools across the land helped nurture our athletes.