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Years ago I wrote a column in The Sydney Morning Herald about the joys of GPS rugby which referred to the special jerseys the First XV players wore and the tunnels the boys formed for their team to run through for the big matches.
The morning the column appeared, I was startled to receive an aggressive, angry phone call from the then headmaster of Shore.
The Shore First XV did not wear special jerseys, there were no tunnels at GPS games and it was wrong to write up the GPS tournament, and so on, in ever louder attacks on me.
I pointed out to him that surely he was at Mackay Oval the previous Saturday and saw his boys run through a tunnel of supporters and surely he must have observed the difference in the jerseys between the Firsts and the other Shore teams?
He refused to acknowledge that he was wrong.
This example, one of many – why did Joeys insist on playing their First XV matches at Hunter’s Hill at the same time as Tests in Sydney in the days of daytime Tests, for instance? – provide the case that, great though the GPS rugby tournament is, it has been covered with too much mystique and elitism for its own good.
There has always been an undercurrent of resentment against Sydney Boys High School, the only non-independent school in the tournament, for instance.
Any reform of schoolboy rugby in Sydney must start with the GPS tournament.
First, because until recently it has been the great Nile source of Wallabies (15 per cent of all Wallabies, had their schooling at Joeys).
Second, because it has had a dominant position in schoolboy rugby for over 100 years in Sydney.
If the GPS tournament is to be maintained in the future (without Sydney Boys High, presumably) it should at least be based on a home-and-away basis.
There should also be a way of keeping High in the tournament, possibly (and this is only a thought) as the conduit of a composite team from the government schools in the Randwick area.
The same home-and-away system needs to be applied to the CAS and CHS tournaments. There probably needs to be a re-allocation of schools in these tournaments, too.
Apparently there was a proposed merger between the two assocations, CAS and CHS, but this has fallen through.
There are other Catholic competitions, club teams and rugby league-playing schools (Holy Cross Ryde?) that could offer some rugby union teams, and that need to be brought into the mix, as well.
The strength of the various Sydney tournaments is their great history over many decades.
But this is also an impediment to any re-structuring program.
In the best of all worlds, you would re-structure schoolboy rugby by starting from scratch and creating what applies throughout, say, New Zealand, where there is an intense city competition between the top schools.
These schools also play traditional rivals from other regions in traditional fixtures.
Finally, the top teams from each city and region play in an annual tournament to establish the best school XV in New Zealand.
I’m very aware that these proposals represent marginal rather than root-and-branch changes.
But the very success of the various schoolboy tournaments in New South Wales, by way of creating a tradition of supporters, providing excellent rugby and creating great players, make it impossible for radical changes to be accepted.
Photo from the High Rugby Friends website.