School sport's level playing field under threat
Five of Sydney's prestigious GPS schools have boycotted competition with another member of their association, The Scots College. The five accuse Scots of offering sports scholarships, in breach of the GPS code of ethics, which stipulates that 'financial assistance to talented sportsmen shall not form part of the enrolment strategy of any member school'.
Scots principal Ian Lambert denies the school awards sports scholarships as such, and refused to tell Fairfax Media whether any premiership-winning basketball players were on a bursary or scholarship, citing privacy reasons.
Callers to talkback radio claim the practice of recruiting gifted sports people is widespread. The head of another GPS school — Kings — admits his school has 'offered inducements to a few good sportsmen' and that 'schools have long learnt the rhetoric needed to defend the deliberate importation of gifted sportsmen'.
The five GPS schools are taking their stand in an attempt to preserve the 'level playing field' that is necessary to ensure that everybody plays by the same rules and there is no external factor affecting the ability of players to compete fairly. It's about protecting amateur sport in schools from the professionalisation and commodification that has come to dominate sport in Australia and overseas.
Fairfax reports that Scots has embarked upon a program of 'buying' students of sports star quality in order to promote an ethos of winning ahead of the more traditional values that encourage the participation of all students. The school is equipped with a new high-performance centre and has a dedicated director of sports science who worked with controversial Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles rugby league consultant Stephen Dank. It would seem that it has moved far beyond what the GPS code refers to as 'the spirit of the amateur' that 'should remain the ideal'.
If teenagers with sporting talent are being 'bought' for the purpose of boosting the school's brand and business, it has to be seen as an exercise in human trafficking. Arguably pressure is being placed on these minors to produce a marketable commodity, and that's child exploitation. It's an an altogether different activity to 'playing' a 'game', which is what school sport has traditionally been about.
Amateur sport stresses participation and promotes the development of character, resilience and teamwork ahead of winning. It is opposed to the commodification of sport that is associated with the cultivation of an elite of highly paid athletes equipped to perform at a high level. Many would-be amateur