Secondary schools battleground for rugby’s real crisis
The proposed shake-up of the international rugby calendar may look like the headline act but what is happening many levels lower is far more pivotal to the long-term health of New Zealand’s national sport.
Schoolboy rugby is in crisis. It is a calamity only set to worsen in the immediate future. It is high time for the adults in the room to start behaving like adults.
A qualifier of sorts here: what follows will look and read like a column, but it is based on dozens of conversations I’ve had with people close to school sport and particularly schoolboy rugby since the story of the St Kents boycott broke in December.
It’s a conflation of ideas, to a degree, but there is a central point: Things have to change at schoolboy level.
Nearly everybody appreciates that things have to change. There is seemingly only one school holding out against that change and one other hedging its bets. The one school that is holding out — St Kentigern College — wields considerable influence and has some support among administrators at professional level.
They have lodged a complaint against 10 1A schools preparing to boycott them this season, claiming they are in breach of rules.
College Sport, which administers school sport in the Auckland region, dive-passed the complaint to an independent panel led by Wellington lawyer Tim Castle and including former All Black Ian Jones and former principal Gail Thomson.
There is an important and sometimes misunderstood distinction here: the panel is not ostensibly charged with investigating the behaviour of St Kents that led to the boycott (more on that soon), but on the behaviour of the boycotters.
If that seems like cart before horse, well, you’re right.
The results of that investigation are not yet public but already the jungle drums are beating that the panel will find in favour of St Kentigern. Those same drums are also sending out a message that the 10 principals will either appeal against, or ignore, such a finding.
In fact, as the story from the weekend made clear, rules are being tabled at a Special General Meeting of the Auckland Secondary Schools Rugby Union that will allow teams to default two matches a season without the punitive measures of yesteryear whereby teams would be docked 15 points for a default (and a second one would result in a two-year expulsion from the competition).
Auckland SSRU chairman Brett Kingstone admitted the boycott furore had expedited the redrawing of the bylaw but framed it as a measure largely aimed at health and safety. Teams from schools with limited playing resources would no longer be pressured into fielding players who were not physically capable to avoid the harsh penalties. That is where we stand now. How we got here is important, but in the eyes of the majority of the schools, best forgotten. They want an amnesty on the past, they say, with a view to a better future.
Essentially, schoolboy rugby became an unholy arms race with a number of ugly, unintended consequences. We could watch a match between two big rugby schools and marvel at the athleticism and skills, and slap ourselves on the back for coming from a country with such a remarkable conveyor-belt of talent, but what was happening below was less appealing.
Rugby’s biggest marketing tool for youth was that nearly everyone, no matter what body shape or background, could give it a crack and everyone had the same opportunity to “make it”. Rapidly it became evident that the odds of making it were stacked in your favour if you were in certain rugby programmes.
That has had an immeasurable demotivating effect on a number of schools who lack the resources to compete and, even more pointedly, on an untold number of kids who either did not want to be on a pathway to professionalism or who did but felt they had no access to it.
Television coverage has exacerbated the problem. Having commentators wax on about schools being “rugby nurseries” is damaging, particularly when that nursery is private and its pupils are paid for.
Herschel Fruean, who runs the influential High School Top 200 website, explained the dichotomy.
“St Kentigern gets a lot of TV games, they get a lot of mentions, so that’s what you want to be a part of [as a player],” Fruean told the Herald. “There’s a massive difference between Melville High School in Hamilton and St Kentigern in Auckland because you want to be in a programme that trains similarly to a professional team.”
So the big rugby schools kept loading up on talent from other schools, until College Sport rules regulated against poaching from within the region. So those schools with capability went outside the region, the apotheosis of this movement being an already-loaded St Kents bolstering their 2019 stocks by awarding scholarships to five established 1st XV players.
The other Auckland schools, with the support of the down-country Super 8 schools, said “enough”.
Someone noted this was school rugby’s “Lance Armstrong moment”: everybody knew everybody else was messing with the system but this was just too flagrant to ignore.
So the schools, largely, want to get off the recruiting juice and get themselves straight before an outside body demands to come through the school gate to do it for them. Auckland Rugby, for one, would love to “own” the 1A competition (and once even tried to sell the rights to broadcast it), but at the moment, their role is to supply referees.
The last thing the majority of the principals — whose boards should be making abundantly clear that their mandate is education first, human development a close second and extra-curricular success a distant third — want is an outside agency coming in.
That is why this is so important. It doesn’t just frame how schoolboy rugby should look but how schools should operate. If they can’t be trusted to run a bloody rugby competition fairly, why should we trust them with the things that really matter?
Sure, the rugby side, the performance side, is important. We want good players playing good, hard rugby against other good players in a good, hard competition.
But if it comes at the expense of participation, if it comes at the expense of entire rugby programmes that will never have the resources to compete with moneyed institutions, have we irreversibly altered the fabric of the sport?
On the surface, this is a battle of self-interest. It is a battle of egos dressed up in school crests and Latin mottos. But there’s so much more than that at stake. And so much more hand-wringing to come.