But the questions she raises are important. What do schools reward? What forms of masculinity do boys see celebrated? And what happens when adults build sporting cultures around status, dominance and winning, regardless of whether the school is single-sex or co-educational?
These questions matter in New Zealand too. I have been raising concerns about First XV rugby for some time, particularly about recruitment, escalating expenditure and the culture that develops when winning becomes too important. Too often, those concerns have been treated as peripheral to the real business of rugby. I believe they are the real business.
First XV rugby should matter. Boys should want to play for their school. They should train hard, compete fiercely, feel pride when they win and disappointment when they lose. They should experience belonging, responsibility and the pressure and privilege of representing something larger than themselves. Those things are worth protecting.
Christchurch Boys’ High School headmaster Nic Hill. Photo / George Heard
The problem comes when adults allow school rugby to matter too much. When schools recruit players, escalate spending on coaching, use inducements to attract sporting talent or build increasingly aggressive promotion around sporting success, the purpose starts to shift. What should be about young people can become an arms race driven by headmasters, coaches, parents and alumni, where money, recruitment and personal ego begin to shape decisions. In parts of school rugby, that has already happened.
The answer is not more complicated rules. It is a clearer moral standard.
Schools should be willing to say that recruiting students because of sporting ability is wrong and that win-at-all-costs behaviour is inconsistent with the purpose of school sport.
At Christchurch Boys’ High School, we have tried to make this explicit in policy by prohibiting recruitment based on sporting ability and behaviour that reflects a “win at all costs” attitude. I have encouraged other principals to adopt a similar standard. The responses have been revealing: “How would we compete?” “Our community expects this” or simply: “The horse has already bolted.”
Those answers worry me. They suggest that competitive pressure, community expectation and precedent are being allowed to set the moral standard. They should not.
I am not anti-competition. Competition matters because players invest something of themselves in it. The result should matter. Winning should feel good and losing should hurt. Competition also needs restraint.
Contos writes about environments where physical ability, status and group loyalty can become forms of social currency and where entitlement can overwhelm empathy. Boys are also growing up in a digital environment that often presents status, wealth, dominance and winning as evidence of male worth. Schools should challenge that message. They should not reinforce it.
Rugby can help.
For boys, it can teach them to harness aggression without cruelty, strength without domination, loyalty without tribalism and pride without arrogance. But that depends heavily on the adults who coach them. Decent coaches matter because boys learn as much from how adults behave as from what they are told.
School culture is shaped by what adults reward. If we signal that winning is important enough to recruit players from other schools, spend ever greater sums on coaches or treat teenage athletes as institutional assets, students notice.
The question for school leaders should therefore be broader than whether a practice complies with a rule. We should ask whether it is right. Is it good for the player involved? Is it fair to other schools? What kind of people is this helping form? Would we be comfortable plainly telling our whole community that this is how we choose to win?
The scale of recruitment, inducement and spending matters. There is no perfect numerical threshold, which is why judgment matters. Principals should ask what their school’s actions are doing to the people involved. Are we helping young people develop humility, judgment and care, or rewarding entitlement, status and the pursuit of advantage?
New Zealand Rugby (NZR) needs to stop treating uncertainty about formal jurisdiction as a reason to stand back. It has influence, resources and levers. It also has a national responsibility to lead. If NZR is prepared to take positions on competition structures, it should also be prepared to take positions on the behaviours and incentives shaping the game.
NZR could lead the development of a simple national standard for school rugby. Schools could commit not to recruit students because of sporting ability, not to use inducements to attract sporting talent and not to tolerate win-at-all-costs behaviour. They could also commit to communication and branding that is humble, dignified and respectful of opponents.
Some regions have already acted more firmly. Auckland schools introduced stricter rules around player movement and recruitment several years ago. The fact that standards vary so much across the country is itself a reason for NZR to lead.
That would not make First XV rugby less important. It would make it more worthy of its importance.
We should want boys to care deeply about representing their schools. We should want fierce contests, packed sidelines, pride in victory and genuine disappointment in defeat.
The adults around the game must ensure that pride does not become entitlement, belonging does not become tribalism, excellence does not become elitism and ambition does not overwhelm judgment.
School sport should help young people become good adults. In boys’ schools, that includes helping boys become good men. Winning should never become more important than that.
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