These players are no good - let's buy some new ones

 

There’s been a bit of chatter recently about an old, unoriginal issue – recruitment of schoolboy rugby players.

I read everything that Alan Miles publishes on his blog - https://coachtalk.wordpress.com - he eloquently expresses views on school sport that I whole heartedly agree with.

His most recent piece, titled Integrity-driven success in schoolboy rugby dives into the pretty much ubiquitous (among the top rugby schools anyway) area of recruitment. He’s talking about the practice of attracting players to your school on bursaries, who would otherwise not have come there on their own.

While there may be good reasons to give a boy an opportunity when, for financial reasons, he would never have gone to a certain school, his ability to help your 1st team win matches shouldn’t be one of them.

Miles goes on to list a number of things that are wrong with pursuing success by following that route. The pressure on the player who knows he is only there to win games for the school; the obscene sums of money spent on recruitment, and how it could be used to develop all the players in the school; the absence of old-fashioned teacher-coaches in the system; the instilling of dreams of post-school glory in the minds of those players, knowing full well that very few of them will make it to the professional level.

I was tempted to throw my two cents in after reading that, but resisted, mainly because it makes me look like an old fogey who tells the same stories over and over. But then I was sent a link to a voice clip originating, it seems, from an Old Boys/Supporters WhatsApp group discussing what needs to be done following yet another defeat for their school’s 1^st team.

After listening to it, I was reminded of the title of Alan Mile’s piece – Integrity-driven success in schoolboy rugby – and it occurred to me that you could use what’s being proposed as an example what integrity-driven success definitely is not!

I’m not going to put the link up. It’s the sort of thing that gets around, so I’m sure many of you have heard it already. I’m not going to be the one who spreads these sorts of things, and it’s not an original story - the exact conversation takes place in many schools these days. I’d wager.

I’ll tell you briefly what was said, and what is wrong with it.

In essence, the speaker informs us that the coaches have gone as far as they can go with the 1^st team – these players will never be good enough to beat their rivals, so it’s time to give up on them and go shopping for replacements. What a thing to say in an educational context. The coaches aren’t teachers, they’re ex-players (a Google search told me that). An educator who declares that a child in his care cannot be developed any further and so he is abandoning him, should surely be dismissed, on the spot.

It gets worse. Not only is this lot not good enough, the speaker believes, but we cannot trust the future generation of players at the school, and the system in place, to ever produce a winning team again. So, it’s time to introduce a proper rugby programme at the school, starting from Under-14. And what he means by that is that they need to bring in 10 to 15 players per year, on bursaries from now on. And it should start now – there’s a professional scout, he says, who has identified five Grade 11 players who can be brought on board straight away, to salvage the rest of the season and build for next year.

He has had contact with old boys who are willing to help with that, and he will co-ordinate it.

Then he invokes the “Lance Armstrong” rationalisation – our rival schools are doing it, so we have to do it too. And to hell with the ethics and educational values!

As my friend who sent me the clip says: “The plot has genuinely been lost. How awful to play a sport under these conditions.”