Hilda.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast.
Presented by the New Zealand Herald.
School rugby has been under the microscope for years now after controversies over poaching between schools and the live broadcast of games. Those tensions have flared up again, with secondary schools pushing back against NZED Rugby's plans for an under eighteen team to take on Australia. It's not the only sporting code to face pushback though. This week our young rowers take to the waters for the.
Marty cart b Regatta and.
For the first time year, fourteen students are barred from taking part. It all adds to an ongoing debate about how much focus we should be putting on teenage athletes while still allowing the likes of record breaking runner Sam Ruth.
Later on the Front.
Page, we'll talk to AUT Associate professor and co director of AUT's Sports Performance Research Institute and z Simon Wallace.
But first we speak to.
Nzet Herald journalist Gregor Paul about his latest reporting into school sports. Gregor The Herald reported recently about tensions between schools and New Zealand Rugby about plans to create an under eighteen's team. Now the schools feel this would not only detract from the boys' education, but from the existing secondary school teams.
What do you make of zetas wish here?
Yeah, you've got to see this problem and there's a problem from both sides. That the schools have run their own program if you like, forever and the pinnacle of first fifteen rugby for the last forty five years has been a New Zealand secondary schools team.
Now New Zealand Rugby, it's not that they.
Don't like that idea, but they want to have some kind of control and influence on kids of that age because the way things are playing out at the moment, if you're an elite player at that age group, you're not that far away from becoming a professional, and you're not even that far away in some cases of becoming an All Black. For some kids, it's a really short step from school to super rugby into the Old Blacks.
So New Zealand Rugby want to have greater influence. They want to call that a pathway, they want to call that a high performance team, and hence they want to take ownership of what I suppose and their argument for doing it is that they feel that there are kids who are under eighteen. They say about thirty percent of the kids that got picked in their various teams last year who weren't actually at school, or they were at schools where they didn't have a first fifteen program and
they were therefore forced to play for clubs. So if you open, if you change the New Zealand secondary schools into an under eighteen team, it becomes more inclusive and you can have more kids avail to play in it. But the schools will be arguing, look, this is a this is a system that's not broken. Why are we trying to fix it?
Do you reckon the school's defiance is actually about the boys' education? Or do the schools get some kind of incentive by having a good team that wins all the time?
Or am I just being a negative Nancy?
I know you're not being a negative Nancy. Mean, look, I think that there's a general level here school principles. I didn't spend a lot of time around my school principle, thankfully, but they tend to be you know, they've got a view about how they want things. They've controlled things, they want things to be on their watch. It's on a sort of broadbrush level. They don't like the idea of outside interference of a third party i e.
In New Zealand Rugby having control over their kids. So that's part of the issue. Is it about their education?
Well, there's a legitimate concern that if you give a third party the right to schedule training, camps, trials, when matches get played at that level, you could easily have massive interfere apearance in your academic schedule because they won't be aligned at that point. And you know, if New Zealand Rugby decided they want to have a camp in September, then you know kids are going to be asking can
we leave school? Can we come out of school at a time where they really do need to be in school for their academic cycle, which you know that's kind of getting close to exam time. So there is a legitimate concern around giving control of scheduling to another body because schools argue that they, you know, they are the best institution to provide a holistic and conjoined education if
you like. Where they can build Rugby around academics, they can build it around other commitments without everything you know, clashing, So yeah, I do think they're concern on that front as genuine.
How many of these kids would actually go on to have successful careers in rugby and become an all black and stuff. Because if you take them, the ones that are really good in school, ship them off to these kind of camps and they don't succeed in becoming a rugby star and their education is laxed, then that puts a huge amount of pressure on them.
Yeah, one hundred percent, right, Look, tiny, tiny, one percent, I would imagine I don't actually know the numbers, but people sort of quote less than one percent. You know, what of these kids will will succeed in becoming full time professional rugby players for a duration that they could say that they made a living out of it.
Very hard to do.
So the schools, I think are right because if you create an under eighteen team and start talking about pathways, training camps, all this kind of stuff, it starts to feel that you're professionalizing the system in the minds of the players, and the schools are arguing, well, if we just have a New Zealand Secondary schools team at the pinnacle and at the end of the year, the best twenty kids are picked and you get to go to Australia. It's almost like a prize rather than your a career
and centive. It's a hey, your prize is you played really well on our team. Someone else thought that you were that good that you'll play in a schools team. So you're kind of de intensifying. You're not glamorizing it to the same extent. You're not saying if you make this team, you know you're now in a system where we're pushing you through with a view that you could
become a professional rugby player. You're just being rewarded for having played quite well and a lot of the kids are more comfortable with that environment because we do.
I feel I would rather start.
I would like to see holistic kids coming out of school so that you could play for a New Zealand secondary schools team.
Because you're really good at rugby.
But your plan at that point is still you know you've done well academically, you're off to go to university or you're involved in a trade and you're thinking along those lines rather than I've made the New Zealand under eighteen team. I'm now thinking I could push forward and try and be a professional rugby player. The nuance is quite significant when you think about it in those terms.
I mean, when I was a student, it was for kind of a pretty common knowledge that the big school has always got the best players. The school I went to was far from a top sporting school or academic school, so we didn't have the best team. Nobody was being enticed to come and play for our school, that's for sure. Any players we had were guys that were kind of
homegrowing and just went through the ranks. And that's kind of what some of the schools who are complaining about this practice are saying, Like, one of the principals of one of the schools that has lost the player to Saint Kens has seen you and our teachers worked hard on him one of the students for three years academically and he's done really well. And now Saint Kent's are reaping the benefits not only from the academic staff but also sporting wise.
And this comes only a few years after some major scandals in schoolboy rugby. Hey, firstly, we've had several instances of tensions over alleged poaching of students to play for a school rugby team, starting in late twenty eighteen, when I think Saint Kent's wasn't it got boycotted from the competition over its tactics.
Then in twenty twenty, Sky.
Sports broadcast plans of school games ran into issues with Auckland and they eventually pulled the pin. Now, why are we so passionate about teenagers playing rugby?
What does a win mean for school?
Well?
When you say why are we, I mean push back on the question a little bit and say who's the Wii? Because as a parent to three kids, you know, I fully endorse sport as something that my kids have all done.
They've all enjoyed it.
But I couldn't care less what level they perform at. I don't care whether they win or lose. I just care that they enjoy it. And I suspect that there are a massive mix of views among parental communities around. You know how many parents would agree with me on that? How many parents think, actually, I want my kid to win, I want my kid to play for the top team. I want my kid to be coached almost professionally. Because your question is where does the passion come from and
what does passion mean? I suppose because everyone's got a different view about what role sports should play, whether it's just for participation, to round that in education, is it to in is that a career prospect? And I think all of these things aren't particularly well managed through the school system because schools come under that kind of such a variety of pressures from different parental expectation that they
don't quite know how to manage it. And probably what we've seen is that we've aired towards allowing those that want professionalization of sport, that want their kid to be given every opportunity to go on and play at the highest level. I think we've carried out to that parental force and that's where you see the passion coming from. Hence we got televised drugby hence we had poaching, because schools feel that pressure, particularly private schools who use it
as an enticement tool. They think success on the sports field relates to people wanting to pay money to come to that school because their kid might get that opportunity that,
you know, to play at the highest level. So I really think we've got a multitude of problems that swirl around school sport and it all relates to different expectations, and schools probably got out of control in the sense that they bowed to the pushy parent, if you like, and maybe what we've seen in the last two three four years of schools regaining a bit of control and pushing back against the pushy parents.
Heading to the water.
Now.
Earlier this year, schools involved in the rowing competition voted overwhelmingly to ban year fourteen players from taking part in the Marty cap. These were players who should have graduated high school already, but remained enrolled for a few more months so they can keep competing. Now, are you surprised it took this long to ban this practice.
Well, probably not, because I think it's one of those things that crept up through a legitimate pathway that I think back in time there was some legitimacy to some academic kids coming back for a short period because I think back then there were exams potentially all overseas, exams that they were doing that they needed to come back and do that enhanced their ability to go to an overseas university, and hey, guess what, while you're here, legitimately, you know, you might as well up in the boat
and row or whatever was happening. So I think there was a sort of legitimate start to all this, but what always happens in schools is that that system, over time gets abused, and certainly in rugby, there were guys coming back to school who had done particularly well academically in year thirteen, but they also hadn't fulfilled ambition, you know, to make a representative team, or they felt that if they came back for a year fourteen, you know, they
might get picked up on a professional contract or a pathway or whatever they were thinking. And over time the system kind of got out of control a little bit and people lost track of just how many year fourteen
kids were coming in to play sport. So it's probably just one of those gradual creeps that happened, and then eventually I think the rowing probably became the flashpoint where principles realized, actually, there's actually quite a lot of kids because of the timing of the Mardi Kappas suspect because early in term one, so if you have year fourteen kids, they can come back for one term.
And I think they just got out of control.
They realized how many kids were doing it, and now they've taken a stance and say, nop, this is getting this is getting silly. So look, it doesn't surprise me it took that long because you've got to have a bit of an overview, and it's sometimes hard to see when you're in the system.
Thanks for joining us, Gregor.
Absolutely my pleasure.
In a country where some sports reigned supreme, there's a huge focus on prepping and priming our next generation of stars. Co director of AUT's Sports Performance Research Institute and said Simon Wallace joins us now to talk about the pressure we put on our teenage athletes. Simon, you've done research into this area. What can you tell us about the health impacts on teens that are caught up in those high profile sports like this.
It's not so much the impact, it's the potential impact that the increasingly pressurized environment which we've seen over a number of years, which is sort of accelerating at the moment, consequently leads to potential impacts on young people participating in sports, and those can be play out in religion to physical and physiological impacts, mental health impacts, and psychological The evidence sort of shows that if there's a supportive environment in
place for young people as they entered these environments, a lot of those can be mitigated against. So it's really about the support networks that are in place to help young people navigate these pressures, which ultimately decide if these impacts are going to play out.
In any way.
Tell me what does high athlete identity mean?
High the identity is an area throughout the last decades for youth in particular, is problematic, as if you define your character in relation to your ability. Let's say in New Zealand, same school verse fifteen rugby player, they just associated with that. With rugby sort of being perceived traditionally as our national sport, you could have your identity wrapped
up with being that rugby player. That can be challenging in many ways because if you get injured and for example, and your career ends, or if you get injured and you miss the season, if your sense of self worth and self esteem is so wrapped up in your athletic prowess, then that can have an impact on other aspects of your life. And if that's taken away, that can be you know, sort of devastating effects.
It's quite a common trope in those teen dramas, isn't it. When there's a high school jock or something and he gets a knee injury and he thinks the world's going to end?
Is it that kind of thing?
Yeah, And if you think about sort of you know, in the New Zealand situation like the rugby league, so a lot a lot of young people go over to the NRL sixteen seventeen, eighteen years of age. There's a lot invested in that that might be sort of wanting to make the family proud, that obviously want to establish themselves a professional career if other things have gone by the by, So if they're not focusing on their education and sort of upskilling, so if sport doesn't work out
for them, you know, that can be really problematic. So we've seen that over the years with people going into pursue high performance sport careers and then that's been taken away for whatever is lid and make the cut based on sort of talent development or they got injured and that didn't work out, or they got homesick and need
to come home. So if everything is wrapped up and you know, I'm an athlete as opposed to I'm a seventeen year old boy or a girl who happened to be good at sport, then that gets really problematic.
So it would be important to have that support network around you.
Yeah, one hundred percent.
And social media has magnified everything that we experienced, well, when I experienced when I was younger. You know, if you were going through those adolescent years, they're tough enough anyway, but now with a constant spotlight on you through social media and self image and status and all.
Of that, there's no real hiding from it.
You can't get so it's almost like a constant pressure that you can't get away from. So learning strategies to deal with that and having the supported networks around becomes really really important.
Before I started looking up statistics, I made a phone call to the guy in my town who's the president of the local Little League association. He told me that the Little League Association has been in existence since nineteen fifty nine. Now, we couldn't come up with a statistically credible estimation of the number of children who had played in the league over all of those years, so for the sake of argument, let's just say it was a lot.
They told me that in their almost sixty years of existence, the number of children that had gone through their program that he knew of that ended up playing Major League Baseball was two.
I would all like to think that everyone can flourish and succeed, but being really stick here, only a handful of kids playing in their chosen sport today are actually going to make it professionally, aren't they. So what's the point of putting so much pressure on these teenagers?
Yeah?
I think, Look, I love and it's great to see people excel and do their best at it. But we know the evidence shows in the United States with the NFL and.
The Premier league football academies.
You know, it's something like, you know, these young people aget signed up really at really young ages for these premier league academies, and yeah, very few. We know from the evidence that very few actually make it through to professional ranks.
So if you take the.
Premier league football academies in the UK and you look at the NFL, the amount of athletes who are signed quite young and actually go on to play in the professional game, I think it's about one to two percent of young people who actually are signed up with football academies in the UK.
So very few people actually do make it through. You'd have to ask the.
Question, why so much pressure and why so much investment so young, and it sort of closing the door on late developers. As youth develop at different stages, some develop earlier than others, and that those late developers possibly not selected early on because of their haven't developed physically as fast as their peers. Possibly we're losing them from sport
as well. So it's a double wammy. The ones who are in the system the majority don't make it, and it closes the door on other people from actually entering into the system.
So I saw last week fifteen year old runner Sam Ruth became the youngest person to ever run a sub four minute mile. Now, this is obviously a major achievement for him personally, but for the country as well. Where do we strike that balance between supporting clear superstars like Sam but not thrusting them into the spotlight so much that it could negatively impact on them.
Yeah, I've been following that.
You know, that's an incredible performance from somebody who are young and attract significant media attention.
From Olympics point of view, the International Olympic.
Committee commissioned about twenty five leading experts in youth development from across the world, so scientists, physiologists, people with experiencing coaching youth development sports psychologists.
They came up with a consensus.
Statement on what age is the right age when young people should be going to the Olympics, and they couldn't agree on an age. So what they did do was identify all the challenges and barriers, some of them we've talked about that do impact on young people, and they came up with recommendations that would support somebody like Sam
for example, be a classic example of that. But it's having the right people around them who understand the appropriate training load for people going through the adolescence and they'll go through various stages of growth spurts. We know that during adolescence the risk of injury is much higher than for other age groups. So it's having that knowledge around them from the trainers and the people working with them
physically to understand what an appropriate training load is. Then you also need some supportive parenting around them to help guide them through the pressures that come with that. You know, the school environment and everybody involved with them around them needs to be providing a lot of support. Now, now
what I read about Sam, I don't know Sam. It seems he doesn't have a very supportive environment around him and that's great, but you know, not athlete is going to have that, So yeah, there is a lot of pressure on it and it needs to be. You just need to support these people with a network of people
around them. That's a sports organizations, the cultures, xos, physiologists, the nutritionists and that rock around service which helps them navigate this time because he really is in the spotlight right.
Thanks for joining us, Simon.
No problem, it's pleasure. Thank you.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at NZ Herald, dot co dot MZ. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also a sound engineer.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.