Yep and considering most of the other cas schools also use public ovals it’s extremely ignorant.
It’s not professional sports, a tier system won’t work cause it’s different boys every year .. it’s not the same team …
The simple answer is that you don't place schools in tiers because of 1st XV performance in one year. The first place you start is the size of the Rugby program: does the school field four or five teams in each age group (or more), or just two? You do that because as far as possible you want each school playing the same opponent through the grades on the same day.
Best synopsis I've read, but won't happen regardless due to entrenched 'tradition'. ISA does it best with their tiers. Absolutely critical to match (as far as possible), the rugby program and not just the 1st XV which can be stacked while the rest of the club/school gets belted. The 3rdXV comp in GSP isn't a bad compromise - different world we live in today and demographics very different and rugby on life support in Oz
That’s all well and good … But the whole premise of the proposed tier system on this board was one based on promotion / relegation system similar to Premier league .. which is yearly …. That’s what people were promoting here.
rugbynews.net.au
rugbynews.net.au
This is an interesting solution and here is the problem. A school like Barker has a fine first XV and very thin depth (on average)in every other grade and year. What tier should they be in? Newington 1’s beat Joeys by 2 points last week and there 2’s lost by more than 50. What tier should they be in?
Give me a call next time Shore wins the GPS...
It's actually not a problem. If your only good team is your 1st XV, you're not a tier one school, you're just a top-end recruiting drive. You want to be a tier one school, do more than recruit half a dozen players a year (I don't mean to say that this applies to either Barker or Newington). One effect of the tiering is to allow schools to compete at the level appropriate to their program (and one desirable side-effect could be to stop the situation where schools feel they need to recruit Year 11s in order to field a competitive 1st XV).
Aren’t you contradicting yourself here ?
Is it just about winning?
No. How?
Cause they’ve improved as a school… just cause the 1xv aren’t champions yet, doesn’t mean they haven’t improved.
Of course not. No one suggests that. But Shore last won the GPS in 2005. Their last outright (ie, not shared) win before that was in 1969. That does tend to suggest an imbalance in the competition.
No, because Shore have improved their rugby program as a whole, many of their A's and B's team can and have beaten other schools this year.
I'm not saying that Shore belongs in tier two. What I'm saying is that in this (highly hypothetical, because I'm not in charge and no one has the guts to do it, because a bunch of old boys would go beserk and threaten to stop their donations) scenario, you would make tiering choices based on a range of factors, of which recent 1st XV performance is only one. And recent 1st XV performance is in some ways the least important, because we all know that any school that wants to can recruit a brand new, competitive team despite having a shallow Rugby program and developing little of its own talent. You know what? The US College football system has three divisions, like schools play like schools, and it works just fine. New Zealand has a structured schools Rugby system. It's not easy, but it's feasible.
Not really? joeys last won the head of the river in 2015 and before that in the 70s…. But they’ve come second like a million of times …. That still makes them a competitive side