New Zealand's schoolboy rugby crisis: How did we get here and where do we go from here?

Scenes during the Kings College v St Peters College final last year. Photo / Photosport

ANY GIVEN MONDAY with Dylan Cleaver

The proposed shake up of the international rugby calendar may look like the headline act, but what is happening many levels lower is actually far more pivotal to the long-term health of the national sport in New Zealand.

Schoolboy rugby is in crisis. It is a calamity that is 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 an official complaint against 10 1A schools that are 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).

Chairman of the Auckland SSRU 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 of 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 do not have the resources to compete and, even more pointedly, on 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 NZME. "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."

St Kentigern fans. Photo / Photosport

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 the Auckland schools, with the support of the down-country Super 8 schools, said "enough".

Someone noted that 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-curricula 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.

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Rugby and cricket largely got it right during the weekend.

I'm not going to offer any words on the abomination in Christchurch other than to say everybody will have an opinion on the best way to handle tragedy.

The swift cancellation of the third test between the Black Caps and Bangladesh, whose players were on the way to Al Noor mosque when the shooting started, might seem obvious but New Zealand Cricket deserves credit for the speed in which the decision was made and communicated.

The decision to cancel the southern Super Rugby derby was probably trickier given the match was hosted in Dunedin but again the right call was made. I've seen some commentary suggesting that cancelling the match was somehow a victory for the terrorist, but you only had to listen to TJ Perenara talk at the conclusion of the Chiefs-Hurricanes match on Friday night to understand that there is a time for fun and games, and this wasn't one of them.

Perenara deserves a special shout out. In a sport that has done plenty over the years to suppress anything but deeply conservative thought among its players, he is an articulate and thoughtful spokesperson for his generation. My hope is that he is encouraged to continue to speak his mind and to keep asking the right questions.

Kudos, too, to Crusaders CEO Colin Mansbridge. He was open to suggestions for a name change to his franchise when many administrators would have taken a far more defensive posture. I'm not sure we want to over-egg the cake on the whole team-name thing just yet but through horrible, previously unthinkable circumstances, it might just be that having a team named the Crusaders in a city where a slaughter of Muslims took place is untenable.

It is, as Mansbridge acknowledged, a discussion that should take place at the appropriate time.

THE MONDAY LONG READ ...

This reportage from the NFL combine is a great example of how details maketh the story. The piece could have been terrible – jaded reporter goes to largely irrelevant week-long spectacle – but it soars because it has passages like this: "Women react strongly to the predatory energy at Prime – 'Soooo many men,' a female reporter said, standing next to me in a corner – and most of the women I work with have stories, some of which make you roll your eyes and some of which make you ball up your fists. Around 2 am, I sat at the bar and watched someone grab the waitress' ass. When I pulled the waitress aside to ask if she was OK, she smiled thinly and said, 'Welcome to the combine.'"