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Nudgee College in danger of rugby ban by GPS over Year 12 scholarships
by Matthew Fynes-Clinton
THE Nudgee College First XV risks being thrown out of this year's GPS rugby competition after enrolling Year 12 students on sports scholarships. The tactic was outlawed in a resolution carried by the nine Great Public Schools headmasters at their annual general meeting on October 26 last year.
Peter Chapman, the elite group's chair and principal of St Joseph's College, Gregory Terrace, fought for the ruling.
He believes final-year sports scholarships are designed solely to buy premiership success in a blatant abuse of schools' ethics and the core business of educating.
But Nudgee College, which trumpets the Catholic Christian Brothers' tenet of "justice", has brought two top footballers into its class of 2010.
The recruits have joined a First XV possibles squad laden with sports scholars, who together enjoy hundreds of thousands of dollars in remitted school fees.
The Courier-Mail has spoken to families of eight of the scholarship-holders, verified the identities of two others and heard from Nudgee teachers with much larger estimates of the true number.
One of the boys, a 195cm, 90kg Queensland Schoolboys player, has arrived at Nudgee to repeat Year 12 and test himself in the pressure-cooker of GPS rugby.
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