Elite school sports culture has much to answer for this week. But it can still be a force for good

August 22, 2026 — 3:00am

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Between Scots, St Gregory’s and the Swans, it has been a shocking week for famously male environments which have generated appalling allegations of sexual assault.

In the case of Scots, three students, aged 13 and 14, have been charged with aggravated sexual assault and aggravated sexual touching of a 14-year-old girl in Bondi Junction.

St Gregory’s College, the private school in Campbelltown, has had two students charged with raping a 17-year-old girl.

With the Swans, none of the five players stood down for breaching club standards amid a police investigation into an alleged sexual assault have been charged – and may not be – though all have been suspended for events at the Pullman Hotel in the wee hours of last Monday morning.

The Scots case prompted Chanel Contos, a woman I have interviewed and whom I deeply admire – to pen a very strong piece in the Herald, decrying the environment which can produce such appalling alleged behaviour.

Contos has done hugely valuable work highlighting the horror of girls suffering sexual assault because of toxic male environments breeding aggressive entitlement that too often goes completely unchecked.

What caught my attention in her piece this week was her sheeting a good chunk of the blame to rugby, specifically.

“In 1828,” she wrote, “Thomas Arnold became headmaster of Rugby School in England and embedded the game of rugby into the curriculum, as an alternative to his students fighting with local boys or illegally poaching game from private properties. Essentially, Arnold domesticated the violence and then made it elite.”

In the modern day, she wrote, “the relentless pursuit of victory in contact sports at elite boys’ schools reflects and reinforces a broader culture in which a win-at-all costs dominance is celebrated”.

I take most of her point. The win-at-all-costs stuff, particularly at elite schools – with scholarships, performance managers, etc – does go way too far and does breed entitlement. After a week like this, you have to figure we have seriously stuffed up.

For what it’s worth, when I have spoken over the years to schoolboys from elite institutions, one of the points I always make is that they have no right to strut around like they’ve hit a century before lunch, as they were bloody well born on 80 runs. But at least one of the upsides of those physical games is they can actually be levellers, where all of your elitism is left behind as the stuffing is knocked out of you.

The danger is when sport becomes so elite and its practitioners so lauded – with no consistent voices telling them to pull their bloody heads in – that toxic entitlement is the consequence.

Ditto, Aussie Rules and rugby league. But it is not ipso facto the case that young ones playing sport seriously will become bad bastards. Two years ago, the great feminist writer Helen Garner wrote a book called The Season, about watching her 16-year-old grandson Amby play and train for his under 16s Colts side over the course of a season.

She enthused that watching him and his teammates through that long, cold winter allowed her to “glimpse what is grand and noble, and admirable and graceful about men”.

When the accused in sex crimes are children, school leaders must wake up to a toxic culture

Chanel ContosFounder of Teach Us Consent

Founder of Teach Us Consent

Of her renewed enthusiasm for Aussie Rules, she wrote, “I saw that it’s a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry.”

I repeat. That from Helen........

© WA Today