The real truth about our rugby league youth
Penalties for using the wrong vocabulary, spot-checks on note-taking accuracy and regular chats about upholding social standards and personal development.
You might be thinking this is a deportment school.
It’s not. This is how the next generation of rugby league players is being groomed.
And it’s not just the elite. There are thousands of kids across Australia being raised this way by a game that is so often perceived in negative terms.
Two decades ago I played in the Queensland Rugby League’s Colts competition, the top rung for kids who want to go on and do something serious with their footy in adulthood – or at least test themselves in the present moment.
This season, after a period being involved mainly with international league development and representative media, I’ve gone back to see how the best development systems in the game raise young men under their charge in 2019.
It’s been an eye-opener, for although I’ve really never left the sport (I played up until this year), I had no idea how much things have changed, how detailed preparation has become and how high expectations have lifted.
Like many league fans, I’ve grown dismayed for years at the inaccurate, uninformed and negative portrayal of some aspects of rugby league in the mass media.
But this year, the stark realisation that social commentary is so far removed from the daily achievements of the majority of young men in the sport has stepped up another level again.
When you hear that the legal team of a star NRL player claims he wasn’t educated about poor behaviour, you have to shake your head.
It is drilled into players constantly from a young age.
When you see people slagging off rugby league players as living an unintelligent, wasteful existence, you have to laugh.
These kids have to be so clued-up and switched-on to do what they do. The work ethic, attention to detail and discipline they get instilled is comparable to a military unit.
I don’t say that lightly either. I know the gravity of making a statement which compares the defence force to a sport, but I’d challenge anybody to walk away from the same environment feeling otherwise.
Furthermore, when you read or watch commentators after being embedded in an elite junior system, you realise just how very little they understand about what is happening on the field in the modern game.
The addition of the ‘strategist’ on many league shows or in magazines (think Andrew Johns, Matt Elliott, Brian Smith) has been a welcome advent in recent years for an increasingly analytical public.
However, I’ve come to realise that not even those great minds get it right 100 per cent of the time, albeit they go close.
Then the gulf backwards to other panellists and journalists is a veritable chasm.
But I guess it’s like that old saying: “You don’t know what you don’t know”.
When I first became a journalist for Rugby League Week and Rugby League Coaching Magazine - the year after I played Colts as it so happens - I felt it was my duty to learn what I was writing about.
By pulling some strings, within a year I managed to sit in on every coaching course up to Level 4 (the highest level, which most NRL coaches hold), without walking away with a formal accreditation.
I know other journalists who’ve gone straight from watching a few games on the TV in their lounge room to pointing out the ‘mistakes’ of some of the game’s greatest minds on media platforms which reach hundreds of thousands of people.
Rather than toot my own horn (I think doing at least one coaching and refereeing course should be a basic pre-requisite to sports journalism), I want to say how observing a Level 4 in the late 1990s means I know next to nothing about rugby league in 2019.
From a strategic, cultural and management standpoint, things have shifted massively.
Twenty years ago in Colts we had half-a-dozen kids who would do extra weights before a session, you’d get flogged running up and down mountains or doing sprints until you vomited, a quick stretch down and then you’d go home.
I wouldn’t be as naïve to think things had remained the same today.
Yet for kids who are predominantly not on professional contracts, you would be genuinely surprised by the level of commitment shown in Colts these days.
Our team – the Sunshine Coast Falcons – is aligned with the Melbourne Storm, but the kids in the squad are not being flown interstate, or receiving grand sums of cash, or sleeping in cryogenic chambers or anything elaborate like that.
What they do receive is constant challenges and care by a culture of expectation which trickles down from the highest level.
Due to our geographic location and a relatively sparse population compared to Brisbane, we draw from a wide catchment which extends right out into the South Burnett.
During the pre-season we had one Under-20s player who was driving from the back of rural Kilcoy, after a full day’s work, in to Sunshine Coast Stadium for 3.5 hours of training and then driving home.
On a good day he’d be home before 9pm, or if there were delays or roadworks I might be closer to 10pm. Then he’d be up at the crack of dawn again the next day.
He’d do this four times a week for the kind of intense physical exertion that most people would run a mile to avoid.
Another of the club’s Under 18 players travels in from Cherbourg, around two-and-a-half hours away.
From the first week of pre-season, players are addressed by a CEO who is an ambassador for White Ribbon, an organisation which looks to prevent male violence against women.
The players are told of their education, employment and skills training incentives. They are screened for potential welfare and wellbeing issues. They attend and are invited to seminars on self-development.
Most impressively, it is not done in a box-ticking, production mill type of environment. It is done in the sort of genuine, altruistic manner that many of us will relate to as the true spirit of rugby league.
It’s what’s been happening for years, but now it’s done in a more organised and comprehensive way.
Every player now has video clips of their performances edited and catalogued with individualised comments.
Sure, that’s been happening at NRL level for a while now, but that this technology has now been made available to part-timers in their teens is immense.
It’s a credit to those oft-criticised figureheads in the game’s administration who forked out the money to make it possible – and to the coaches who devote the time to making it work.
Team meetings are now like lectures, where notepads are mandatory, and the phraseology for every action on the field is precise and underpinned by psychological triggers.
This is the stuff that very few see, that could never have been imagined 20 years ago, certainly not at this level.
You have to pinch yourself to remember that these players have just done a 90-minute gym session, squatting and pressing what would put most of us to shame, then are asked to pick up pens and pay acute attention.
When that is done, they take the field and exert themselves again.
I’ve seen several fitness results which display massive improvements on what NRL teams were recording a decade ago; remembering that the kids achieving these are relative no-names who may never play at the top level.
Slip up or cut corners on an exercise and you pay a heavy price.
Rugby league training has always been famed for its ‘punishments’, but now penalties for the slightest indiscretions lead to the type of lung-busting, thigh-burning routines you’d expect to see at the CrossFit Games.
Except in rugby league, these account for less than five per cent of the session length, and there is no scope for Instagram selfies and posting it for posterity.
Again, most of my work in the last decade has been concerned with international rugby league, and you only have to witness what is happening at this young age to realise how much catching up others have to do.
I spent time in France before the 2013 World Cup, visiting a few league strongholds in their domestic competition.
It’s a reality that kids at Under-20s level in Australia are out-performing what grown, seasoned men are doing in the gym at the French elite level.
And that’s not so much just about numbers and output, but by attitude and ethic across the board. If you take the Australian and South Pacific imports out, the French standard is even more worrisome.
But I digress.
I’ve been on a six-hour roadtrip with the Under 20s in which not a drop of alcohol was consumed. Two decades ago, that was unthinkable.
All the female staff of the club are treated with courtesy and respect, which should go without saying, but is now more evident than ever.
I’ve pulled up to training and heard kids sitting in their cars listening to aspirational podcasts, like a young entrepreneur would. Two decades ago I remember a lot of Pantera and Fear Factory in the carpark.
Some things will hopefully never change about what defines rugby league on the field – the constant battle for momentum, the ability to be multi-skilled, and the explosive athleticism.
Perhaps, however, we aren’t giving the sport nearly enough credit for how dramatically it has changed and refined the environment which surrounds it.