This is true. It’s honestly a massive predicament that CAS Rugby has found themselves in. Alloys aren’t competitive in rugby and won’t be until they’re able to provide scholarships to players. The GPS had this problem with Shore being uncompetitive but their structure changed and now they are very competitive. It would suit having a 10 round CAS competition, but you can’t just get rid of team for the values their school uphold. Maybe there does need to be a change in the structure of schoolboy footy, and a structure of a competition with tiers of the teams from the GPS, CAS and ISA could make footy more competitive. However, I don’t see this as a viable solution, as it ruins the culture and profound history of the 3 competitions
I fear that your knowledge of history is pretty shallow. What "culture and profound history" do you mean? is it the proud tradition of Sydney Grammar and Sydney High playing in the GPS 3rd XV competition?
Here's how the history of GPS, CAS and ISA works: exclusion. A bunch of schools asked if they could join the GPS. They were told "no", so they formed the CAS. Then a bunch of schools asked if they could join the CAS. They were told "no" and so they formed the ISA. That's the "culture" - you're not one of us, go away. It's not something worth defending. What holds back the idea of a sensible, tiered Sydney schools Rugby competition is that the GPS schools persist in believing that they have something special that needs to be preserved to the exclusion of other schools.
But the traditional systems are no longer fit for purpose.
GPS wasn't designed so that 25% of its schools couldn't field teams in the 1st XV competition. CAS wasn't designed so that St Aloysius could leak 97 points to Barker. But that's the reality we need to face, not some weirdly romanticised idea about the way things were in 1896.
The reality is that a 10-round CAS competition is unsustainable because, when it did exist, the schools with less depth in any given year were usually so badly impacted by injuries that the games at the end of the season were horrible mismatches, which produced both unedifying football and an unacceptable risk of injury. Usually the schools impacted were Cranbrook, Trinity and St Aloysius, but not always - one year, let's not forget, Trinity beat an injury-depleted Knox 1st XV 73-10.
A tiered structure is the only sensible solution.
