Opinion: It's the kids who suffer while all this bickering goes on | Hawkes Bay Sport | Surfing, Rugby, Soccer, Football, Cricket in Hawkes Bay

In the past fortnight, two key winter codes in Hawke's Bay have come under scrutiny in SportToday pages regarding high school pupils.

Soccer and rugby have courted unwanted attention because of matters pertaining to a lack of accountability from administrators.

In the round-ball game, schools have broken away from their governing body, Central Football, because they have had a gutsful of what they consider to be astronomical fee increases in the past decade.

While not totally averse to paying the proposed fees this year, the schools' ad hoc body embraced autonomy in the absence of a satisfactory explanation of where their money is going.

Instead, the schools successfully accomplished their goals at one-third of the cost of Central Football and New Zealand Football's proposition.

The schools' only misgiving was their inability to secure the services of qualified referees to control their first XI matches on Saturday mornings.

In a classic example of hiding behind officialdom, qualified referees cited NZ Football's draconian "code of conduct" preventing them from performing their voluntary task or openly expressing their desire to officiate, minus the politics.

The bottom line is the pupils, some of them potentially talented enough to grace the international arena some day, are the ones who are suffering while administrators surreptitiously take pot shots at each other to prove political points of authority.

The game is and always will be about the children and their development.

Any grandstanding about volunteers performing thankless tasks is nothing short of patting one's own back.

Secondary schools' rugby is no different. While money is not an issue, the circumstances surrounding the impasse in their competition are even more disturbing.

What transpired in the Bay first XV schoolboys' A grade play-offs is as unpredictable as the erratic bounce of the funny-shaped ball.

I have never heard of a team progressing to the final because the winning team had supposedly defaulted in advance to the losers before the kick-off.

Since when has Lindisfarne College become bigger than the competition and what gives them the right to condescendingly dictate terms to a competition they consider inferior to a quadrangular tournament?

That the draws officer, Karl Jones, and the secondary schools' delegate to the Hawke's Bay Rugby Football Union (HBRFU), Grant Gilbert, are teachers at Lindisfarne causes some uncertainty among outsiders.

It doesn't matter how big or complex an organisation is, the common denominator to achieving harmony is in its ability to be transparent in its operations.

No one disputes HBRFU competitions manager Ian MacRae's email assertion that Jones performs a difficult task.

All volunteers do by virtue of putting their hand up but not to the detriment of the game. How Jones feels should be irrelevant to the impact his actions will have on the competition. Again, it isn't about Jones or any other union or school administrator.

In disqualifying Karamu High and awarding CHB College the bragging rights, MacRae ruled Karamu should have at least played under protest then resolved issues later.

Excellent suggestion but shouldn't Lindisfarne have made it abundantly clear to the other semifinalists that they were not interested in playing the final before defaulting to CHB prior to the kick-off?

All teams want to know who they are playing next and prepare accordingly.

Besides, why was Lindisfarne averse to suggestions of playing mid-week before or after travelling to their quadrangular tourney in Christchurch last week?

If Lindisfarne was going to treat the Bay competition so poorly, then why did they bother to enter it in the first place?

Karamu coach Tom Blake and Lindisfarne counterpart Bruce Spriggens' silence is deafening but, needless to say, both didn't help the situation.

One can assume, akin to soccer refs, there will be repercussions if they speak out.

That a group of Karamu mothers and an anonymous Lindisfarne father have taken the organisers to task is laudable because confused children have to their detriment learned that games can be tragically lost without running on to the field because of myopic assertions.

Such experiences can scar children for life and the codes will be poorer for it.

CHB first XV will feel like anything but champions because their candid coach, Duncan Quinlivan, agrees they were going into a less-than-ideal final "by dodgy means".

Ironically, they have now won the crown by default twice over compared to Karamu's one no-show.

Indubitably, the phantom crown will sit uncomfortably on their head like a recurring migraine of how things can go horribly wrong.

Conversely, Karamu parents will convince their children they are the rightful heirs to the 2010 throne.

The Super 8 competition has come under scrutiny too and its impact on robbing the region of decent competition is evident, with not a single Bay pupil making the New Zealand Secondary Schools rugby team named at the weekend.

Central Football administrators are big enough to acknowledge they can do things better and are listening to those nurturing their future stars in a bid to lure them back into the fold.

Rugby counterparts need to do the same or risk alienating their prospective talent.