Hills Sports High School has claimed its first rugby league National School Girls Cup title after a tense 22-10 win over Queensland champions, Keebra Park High School.<\/p>\n
While dominant in the intra-state competition with three out of four crowns since its inception in 2023, Australian honours had eluded them.<\/p>\n
Until now.<\/p>\n
Playing on Queensland turf at the home of the NRL\u2019s Dolphins, the Hills Girls got off to the best possible start as they raced to a 14-0 lead.<\/p>\n
Havana Cook scored a try off a chip kick and silky footwork by halfback Liannah Amete \u2013 who has dominated the competition despite only being in Year 10 – resulted in another.<\/p>\n
But thoughts of a runaway win evaporated like the huge first half breeze behind their backs, as Keebra Park scored consecutive second period tries to drag the margin back to 14-10.<\/p>\n
Two tries in the dying minutes sealed the result however, as Hills became the first NSW school to win the girls\u2019 national crown.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very special and very surreal,\u201d said Liannah, adjudged the best player in the tournament.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone is family (at Hills Sports) and it means so much\u201d.<\/p>\n
For Endeavour Sports High School, it wasn\u2019t quite to be in the National Schoolboys Cup final against Wavell State High School.<\/p>\n
The Shire team came out of the blocks strongly and took a 6-0 lead after a converted try to Jamie Curran.<\/p>\n
But the home side struck back to be only 6-4 down at the break, leaving Endeavour with plenty of work to do running into the teeth of the wind.<\/p>\n
Two tries and a couple of penalty goals virtually put the game beyond doubt for Wavell High School, though Endeavour remained committed to the end as they came up with a late four-pointer of their own as the match finished 20-12.<\/p>\n
Sports High School President and Endeavour Sports High School Principal James Kozlowski said the performances continued to show the growing status of sports high schools in NSW<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth games were played to a very high standard and we definitely saw some future stars of the NRL and NRLW playing from both our teams,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving two teams here in the national finals and all four teams making the state finals was pretty impressive. It really demonstrates the strength of the sports high schools – and we believe the best is yet to come.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hills Sports High School has claimed its first rugby league National School Girls Cup title after a tense…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":894919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-894918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}