After a hiatus of a couple of years, a friend and I were discussing all things sport over some fine, warm English beer – how hard the 20/20 is to get excited about, where LeBron James will be next year, the chances of New Zealand exploding if we lose the 2011 World Cup – run of the mill chat. Yet it did get intellectual and/or thought-provoking. See, both of us, at one point in our lives probably harboured dreams of playing college sport in the US – once upon a time we may have been touted as young prospects in our respective sports – so we have an interest in how the system works over there.
Basically the system over there, from high school, through college (NCAA) to the pros is an integrated, well-managed situation that allows athletes to flourish. Sure there is a lot of money involved right the way through – even though athletes cannot earn any until they finish college – but the infrastructure is rational and well thought out. Athletes wanting to play professional sport must go to college or university, generally speaking. The end justifying the means is that all the athletes who go to college must perform to a certain academic criteria, otherwise they don’t get to play. So they have to study and pass if they want to succeed on court or on the field or whatever. Basically the NCAA’s mandate is to produce well-rounded individuals, rather than professional athletes.
Seems like a simple formula right? Appropriate grades required to partake. So why has this system not reached our shores yet, and by ‘ours’ I mean NZ? And to be honest I’m looking directly at rugby, which is the nearest thing we have that remotely resembles a professional American sport. It’s strange to think that many professional coaches over the years have been sponsored by the NZRU to travel to the US to gain experience from watching major clubs and franchises, yet they haven’t seen this potential. Why don’t we apply the same system, if slightly tweaked, to our own young athletes to fortify what is essentially the greatest breeding ground for rugby talent in the world?
Anomaly
After the last World Cup defeat, a review cited the problem of players not being able to think during the course of the game or to make decisions under pressure. This was a red flag. It’s a problem inherent in the professional game of rugby in NZ. For the most part, players aren’t very smart. This could be because they just aren’t very smart, or perhaps because all they do is play rugby, with very little in the way of education beyond high school. An integrated system that links schools to clubs and clubs to universities or tertiary providers would give these athletes an excuse to use their brains. This may prove useful every once in a while.
A couple of things might happen here. Namely upholding educational standards in a system that works for the players’ future careers – the ones in which 95% of players fail to play professional sport, requiring them to do something else with their lives – might just raise the standard of professionalism in a sport in which it is often found wanting. Athletes intending to play professionally would at least have to complete a trade, course, diploma or degree so that if it doesn’t work out, they have something on which to fall back. Not only that, but it could widen the reach of education to a seemingly large, often-marginalised population, for whom learning a skill or a trade or getting a degree can be considered pretty futile: the Maori and Polynesian masses who gravitate towards rugby. This isn’t a racial issue, however; just an idea that could have myriad far-reaching consequences. One of which, finally, could be increasing the All Blacks’ chances at the next World Cup if we mysteriously lose this one and the country does, in fact, spontaneously combust.
Cheers Howie.
