Schools ‘must reach out more to the community’ in sport

FORMER Fettes College pupil Sir Bill Gammell has called on state and independent schools across Scotland to open their doors more to their surrounding communities in an effort to help improve Scottish sport.

The 59-year-old businessman was back at his alma mater on Thursday night to open a small gym inside the school which points to a growing effort by Fettes to improve fitness levels in its 500-odd pupils. Former Scotland A coach Steve Bates is the Director of Sport at the school and ex-Edinburgh and Newcastle hooker Sean Crombie is leading the new strength and conditioning programmes.

The gym will be exclusive to Fettes, but Gammell, who was critical of a lack of sporting opportunity when he attended the school, said that it was important that more was done by Scottish schools to create opportunities beyond the school gates.

“I’ve no idea what the Fettes policy is,” he said, “but schools wherever they are should reach out to the community as much as they can. We need to get the schools active with clubs because, if you can get the community involved, it can make a huge difference to sporting opportunity and development.”

Gammell founded the Winning Scotland Foundation five years ago and has launched ‘Champions in Schools’, a programme where leading Scottish athletes fulfil a programme of work with one school for a set period. Now he has introduced a business initiative where Deloitte, the world’s second largest professional services firm, goes into sports clubs to offer business advice. Fettes headteacher Michael Spens insisted that there was a desire to work more closely with local communities. One area he would not move on, however, was the call from rugby clubs across Scotland for a combined under-18 clubs/schools national league to lift standards. He said: “We have worked hard to embrace the community and have another primary schools day just coming up with around 100 children in our area coming along for a day of sport.

“We now play an annual fixture against North Berwick and we are getting in touch with Cathkin High School, a state school in Glasgow made famous by Scotland’s most recent debutant Duncan Weir, to see if they would like to set up a fixture and a new link across the cities.

“But a school is different to a club and what we try to do at Fettes is teach that life is not all about winning, but about respect, values and playing the game properly, so, while I am happy for us to play more state schools, there is a question-mark over games with clubs.”

Clearly there are benefits for Fettes in that approach, too, with the North Berwick connection last year bringing Thomas Spinks to Fettes on a scholarship. Producing internationalists is not the main goal at Fettes, according to Spens and Bates, but the back rower, who is hoping this weekend to add to representative honours achieved in East Lothian with a place in the Scotland U18s squad, could be the first cap since Gammell. Independent schools will remain largely exclusive, but the push to integrate them more into the Scottish sporting landscape may be picking up pace.