School sport commercialism. Hell no!

 

I really don’t know where to begin with throwing in my two cents worth about the recent School Sport Commercialisation Conference. The idea that a sports programme in a school should be seen as generator of revenue is just so wrong to me that anything that might have been said at the conference, no matter how internally logical it may sound, and no matter how good it sounds in the narrow context of what was discussed, is the fruit of a poisoned tree, and I reject it all, without having heard a word of it.

I realise that makes me sound like a puritanical lunatic, but I think this so important that I’ll have to live with that.

I’ve been calling for a complete reset of school sport for some time (and we all know that we are really talking about school rugby here). The genie is out of the bottle, and we are never going to fix things incrementally. I find myself thinking, from time to time, that surely this is as bad as it can get. Recent examples are the ranking of sports schools in the country, which was just loony; the report on player movements between schools; and just last week, a list of school players to watch this season, like they do at the start of World Cup tournaments.

But this one takes the cake. Anyone who tells you it’s the role of schools to run sports programmes that make them attractive to sponsors and ultimately earn money for the school, should be run out of town and never allowed to return.

I get it that the popularity of schools rugby, in particular, is already generating money, and very little of it is going to the schools playing the games. I also know that rugby programmes, in this near professional era, are very expensive to run, and if they want to maintain and grow them, the schools need sponsorships.

But understanding is not approval. This latest development feels like a capitulation to those forces, without asking why they are there and if they belong in school sport.

They obviously don’t. And the real reason why is because the entire edifice is built on the children that play in the games. Are they being considered? Are we sucking more and more of the fun out of it all. To command the big bucks your teams have to perform. The demands placed on the children to make that happen are well documented, as are the dodgy practices that stem from that. The motivation behind it has been about things like school prestige, a magnet for recruitment, and a whole lot of ego for the adults involved. That boosting the commercial value of the school should be added to that list is so bad that, as I said, I just don’t know where to begin.

And it’s all terribly elitist, of course. The kind of commercialisation they are talking of is only for the haves. It’s been accepted that you can’t perform at that level without commercial input, so the top schools are the ones who have the means and they are the ones looking to boost their value. There are only a handful of them, and they were at that conference It’s not for the rest. It’s about the rich and greedy growing the pie and sharing it among themselves. The top of the pile gets higher and higher and the desert around them increases in size and aridity. Rugby is already dying everywhere outside of the schools in the top 20 ranking. This is accelerating the process.

I’m reminded of the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The townsfolk were greedy, remember, and refused to pay the piper for his services. So, he led their children away. Gone forever. They were so concerned about money that they forgot all about the children. I hope we are not doing that too.