In the interests of full disclosure I am a Newington Old Boy (K-12, late 70s to late 80s), I can't recall seeing a fFirst XV win against ayone other than High, Grammar of occasionally Scots for during my time at the College in the later years, so I'm obviously pleased at the College's recent successes. It is quite clear that the offering of pure sporting scholarships is forbidden by the GPS Code of Conduct and I do not endorse the provision of scholarships by ANY school purely for the purpose of winning a GPS Premiership (whether or not the provisionof a sholarship benefits the boy himself in other ways is a different matter). Ted S makes a good point, it is very incendiary to simply add "scholarship" next to a boy's name without knowing the context of that scholarship. It is very possible that a boy who is an excellent rugby player is also a gifted academic, shows leadership skills, plays music or has other talents which merit a schoalrship. To take a recent example, Fin McDonald (who incdientally was at Newington from K and not on scholarship) was Proxime Accessit (Runner up to Dux) with an ATAR of 99.90 and was a talented musician, who also happended to be a handy football player. A more dated example from my era was a Senior Prefect who was Dux (10th in the state for HSC and represented NSW in the Maths Olympiad), played First XV for 2 years, rowed First VIII for 2 years, was Captain of Debating, was in GPS Athletics and was SUO in Cadets His year the First XV had at least 5 boys in the top academic set as well. There was also another Senior Prefect who was Duix and played Australian Schoolboys. Who is to say that the other boys mentioned are also not such all-rounders? I know that Newington did provide several all rounder scholarships to this years' year 12 when they were in year 9 as othewise their year would have been an unusally small one, which would not have provided a sufficient number of leaders (and I mean genuine leaders NOT merely First XV players) for their 150th anniversary year so this could well explain 4,9,10, and maybe even 12.
