ARU moves to halt young guns' slide to rugby league may have come too late Nabbed: Tepai Moeroa and Taane Milne. Photo: Paul Seiser/Seiser Photography ON a sparkling spring day in early September, two of Sydney's most renowned rugby schools played each other to decide who would take out the prestigious 1st XV GPS premiership. The teams oozed talent, 11 Australian Schoolboys representatives between them on the Scots College oval at Bellevue Hill. Three Newington College players, in particular, had been talked about all year. Taane Milne, a Randwick junior with blistering pace and impressive ball skills, had carved up teams all year with his back-line teammate Tepai Moeroa, a national shot put champion and Australian Youth Olympic Festival sevens representative. Joey Lussick was their halfback, the younger brother of Parramatta Eels back-rower Darcy Lussick. Young hopeful: Joey Lussick. Newington beat Scots 32-21 to become joint premiers. Everybody won that day, except rugby. All three have signed deals with NRL clubs. "There is no way rugby can compete with league on a financial front at that level," Waratahs coach Michael Cheika says. At the moment we're relying very much on our schools and they can't do it all. We're losing too many of our quality kids out there. What we have to show is that we have a clear pathway so we can say to them that in two years, if they play well enough, there is a spot for them at senior level. Schools have become a veritable battleground for the hearts, minds and signatures of promising young players. The rugby schools such as Newington and Scots lure talent with scholarships and foster it with top-notch programs, coaches and facilities. They also carefully manage the steady flow of scouts who arrive at their gates from every football code and elite sport. As one former rugby administrator put it this week: "Everyone wants a six-foot-three kid who can run 100 metres in 11 seconds. Rugby, league, AFL, rowing, you name it.. And rugby is being left for dead. The "pathway" is the problem. More like a rough-hewn goat track rather than the sporting superhighway it should be, promising young schoolboy players who aren't either snapped up by NRL clubs or parachuted, Kurtley Beale-style, straight into Super Rugby, have a colts side in the Sydney or Brisbane competition as their only option. Lussick was widely expected to follow his brother into the NRL but Milne and Moeroa were on the Waratahs' radar before they were sewn up by the Roosters and Eels respectively. It isn't Cheika's fault. This year the Waratahs employed a full-time scout, former NSW fullback Tim Kelaher, to scour schoolboys, country and club rugby for talent, so the Waratahs can get a better handle on who is coming through. But while NRL clubs offer a sophisticated hierarchy of age-group competitions, plus a helpful $5000 or $10,000 "pocket money" for the players they really want to lock in, rugby has little to bargain with except the big-picture stuff. Hopefully, that is changing. The Australian Rugby Union is launching its first under-15 and under-17 national competitions next year, in an opening salve in its talent retention war with the NRL and AFL. Called the Junior Gold Cup, the program will feature a 24-team competition in each age group, including four centres that will be based in Sydney. Selection trials will be held in late October and training will be under way less than a month later, and each player will be given a grant of $660 to cover costs. The ARU also wants to give each Super Rugby franchise an under-20s squad and about 11 players in a wider training squad. It is all subject to the money stretching far enough, but Cheika believes the enlarged provincial squads will plug a huge gap. "That sort of program is important because, in the past, these kids would have all gone straight to league," he says. Junior Gold and extended squads aside, rugby has serious catching up to do. At the time Newington's three league-bound stars were tearing it up for one of the country's great rugby nurseries, Wallabies fans were decrying a lack of depth. Even Ewen McKenzie has said he was reaching the limits of the elite talent pool for hooker, second row and wing. Almost a decade ago Wallabies Quade Cooper, Beale, Rob Horne and James O'Connor all made a decision to play rugby instead of league. Many fear that a neglect of those pesky "pathways" since then mean this generation's Beales, Coopers, Hornes and O'Connors will not make the same decision. Newington, in a scenario rugby's true believers might find unsettling, could be breeding the next generation of State of Origin players. Total votes: 4427.