Here’s an idea - join a club, boys.

Coronavirus: Level 2 sport restrictions could see schoolboys repeat final year https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/300090070/coronavirus-level-2-sport-restrictions-could-see-schoolboys-repeat-final-year

Quoted in the above story, on the importance of education, is the head of School Sport NZ who last year worked behind the scenes to help secure school sport marketing and broadcast rights for a private company, the NZ Sport Collective. There was zero consultation with schools.

Sports could take the heat out of this problem by selecting only from club level. Therefore encouraging participation post-Secondary school.

Furthermore, on RNZ today Sport NZ CEO Peter Miskimmin said he was not privy to the commercial nature of deals with NSOs to broadcast school sport events. It makes one wonder then why he signed an NDA with Waddell + Associates when these deals were being put together.

Miskimmin also says schools can opt out of broadcast events. He knows full well they were never given the chance to opt IN. This is the self-proclaimed “Kaitiaki” of sport.

So here’s a scenario:

A sport signs a contract with a private company giving them the marketing rights to a national secondary schools event. That marketing company on-sells the broadcast rights. The sport is promised funding in return.

The schools’ consent has never been sought by the individual sport but the sport will claim the event is their entity and therefore participants will have to agree to be part of the broadcast because that has already been sold.

Now what if a kid, or their family,
or the school - who set their own parameters for their students - for any reason says they do not wish to be a part of that? Is their participation in a national secondary schools event in peril because they wish not to be featured in coverage?

These are monumental issues that have not been well discussed, were largely ignored by Sport NZ, were kept hidden from the majority of schools and may
not have even been considered by the very NSOs who thought they had a legal right to sell these products in the first place.

No one denies the funding of minor sports is critical, and that a collective approach can work. But there should be serious questions asked about why the funding relies so heavily on the aggregation of kids’ sport.