Understanding the Cost/Benefit of Boarding with Reference to Football

Abstract

This chapter looks at the links between elite football and education in elite boarding schools. In elite sporting clubs, privilege creates opportunity and a commitment to excellence. High level sport fosters personal autonomy and empowerment; family and community pride. At the same time, racial stereotypes, institutional racism, deficit discourse and asymmetries of power mean clubs can become sites of trauma. The same dynamics can be seen in elite schools. There are two further links between Indigenous boarding programs and football: many male participants report that they had been chosen to attend boarding school because of their sporting prowess. They had elected to take up the opportunity because attending an elite school promised to provide an effective entry point into the football industry. Parents identified this paradigm as a desirable mechanism to disrupt intergenerational patterns of disadvantage.