Nudgee are a prime example of buying/getting in league players. Very few students starting school in year 5 will be playing 1st team in year 12. According to my source U15A, u16A this year at Nudgee will have at least 10 league players in each team. They start coming in grade 9,10 and 11. But will they win the GPS premiership?
My friend, it's clear that you simply don’t grasp the full picture do you? Let me spell it out for you.
From the 2024 Nudgee First XV,
nine out of fifteen players had been enrolled since Year 5. The year before? Even more so. So to claim that Nudgee “buys” players simply because they happen to come from a league background is not only misinformed, it’s embarrassingly reductive.
You also seem to be forgetting - or perhaps were never aware - that Nudgee is a boarding school. A
significant proportion of its rugby cohort are boarders hailing from
rugby league-dominated regions like Yeppoon, Rockhampton, Goondiwindi, Moree, Roma, the Gold Coast, and the Sunshine Coast. Naturally, when these boys arrive, they gravitate towards local league clubs like Norths or the Dolphins, given their familiarity with the code. Hence the increase in Nudgee boys playing in Representative and Club league teams.
And speaking of the Dolphins,
Nudgee has a formal partnership with them. This isn’t breaking news. It’s been public knowledge for years. So yes, when scouts show up, particularly from league, of course they're going to approach players already embedded in the network.
Now let’s address your point about scholarships. Nudgee is currently operating under significant financial constraints and has
reduced the volume of scholarships, aside from bush bursaries. If you're looking for a school aggressively acquiring students in Years 9 and 10 with sporting scholarships, look no further than BBC. Their scholarship numbers are astonishing — and yet, despite all that investment,
they couldn’t win a single match against Nudgee last season, not even one.
Let’s also not pretend Union is thriving untouched by external pressures.
Rugby league is overtaking Union at pace. To deny that is to admit you're either willfully ignorant or completely out of touch with the current state of GPS rugby.
Now, I won’t insult your intelligence by denying that Nudgee recruits league players - because of course we do. So does
every other GPS school. But to paint Nudgee as the same “cash cow” it once was is a gross exaggeration. If you've done your homework - and I suspect you haven’t - you'd know that for 2025, the schools
leading in scholarship numbers are TGS, BBC, TSS, and even GT.
So before you throw around accusations with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, do try to come equipped with facts - not outdated narratives and misinformed generalisations.
*** and yes they will be bringing home #46
