Fears NSW sports school students are ‘falling behind’ as attendance slumps, training demands rise
NSW’s seven public sports schools have “a major problem”, says one of Australia’s leading high performance experts, with elite academies demanding more of students than professional athletes.
Education
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One of Australia’s leading sports scientists has criticised NSW’s seven sports high schools for allowing student athletes to be overtrained by letting elite sports academies overrule their study schedules.
Dr Craig Duncan, former head of sports science at Football Australia, said sports schools have “a major problem” that is resulting in students undertaking more hours of training at a higher intensity than would be required even of an adult professional athlete.
“I’ve actually monitored a couple of kids … and when you add up all the sessions, they’re doing just as much, if not more than a professional soccer player,” he said.
“The issue is that everyone wants a piece of the child: the sports high school wants their piece, the Academy wants their piece, the club wants theirs, the Federation wants a piece and none of them speak to each other.
“These (students) are people first, rather than just athletes, right? Are we just throwing away their entire education for them to try to be good at sport?”
Some of the most recognisable names in Australian sport are alumni of the schools, including NRL stars Adam Reynolds and Josh Addo-Carr and Matildas Ellie Carpenter, Caitlin Foord and Kyra Cooney Cross, but since 2021 attendance rates in the state’s sports specialist schools have fallen further and faster than the high school average.
The average attendance rate across the group of seven fell to 79 per cent in 2022, two percentage points below the state average, with Illawarra Sports High School and Westfields Sports High School seeing slumps of more than 7 per cent.
Past HSC results also indicate sports high schools also have fewer student performing at the highest level academically. In 2022, all schools averaged 8.3 per cent of HSC entries in Band 6, while the figure for sports schools was 1.5 per cent.
Westfields Sports High School recorded the most ‘distinguished achievements’ last year, 20, while Matraville Sports High School had only one.
Katherine Thompson has been running a UNSW partnership pathway at Matraville for the last eight years, over which time the number of students continuing on to university or TAFE has improved to over 40 per cent.
“A lot of the highest academic achievers at Matraville are also some of the highest sporting achievers,” she said.
“My personal view is that they could be stricter about excluding kids from sport if they have either an academic or behavioural issue … that’s when sport can really take centre stage and academics suffer.”
The NSW Sports High School Association has raised “significant concerns” over club academies requiring students to miss out on class time, in a letter to Football Australia reported by the ABC.
“In my view, if you gave me your child and said ‘I want them to be a professional athlete’, they would not be going to a sports high school,” Dr Duncan said.
At Westfields, local area intake student Sarah Honeyman said she’s observed her peers in the talented sports program struggling to keep up with attendance and academics.
“Some require a lot of interstate travel for competitions. I feel like they definitely fall behind when it comes to coursework, because it’s hard to catch up once you start to fall behind.,” the 16-year-old said.
“Sometimes they struggle to keep up with the rest of us that don’t do sport.”
Olympic diver Sam Fricker knows better than most how tricky it can be to be both an elite athlete and a HSC student.
The 21-year-old graduated from Sydney’s prestigious Trinity Grammar School in 2020, and said a “give-and-take relationship” with the school’s leadership was vital to “getting through” his final years.
“It was a constant battle, and it was a unique position that I could only really relate to with my other athletes and the team that I trained with,” he said.
He warned students with similar ambitions to keep up their schooling, or risk having little to fall back on.
“Sport is important, yes, but it can’t be everything, and education is extremely important.”
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