Ulster Rugby trial -continued

TBH I didn't give much of a shite Why and found it vaguely amusing. I didn't know the rugby players. I was there to get 3 As in my A levels, which I got thanks to the excellent teachers. I was a bit square I suppose. I stayed in girls' boarding, which is now closed. I have never been among such a high concentration of anorexics, bulimics and self mutilators (nice people but high achievingly stressy, some of 'em).. God forbid you should appear for breakfast 2 minutes' late with your tie not straight though. Priorities hey. I don't think the girls in boarding were completely representative of the whole school though.

Placemarking

Echoes of Steubenville...

Thanks OP.

Interesting, Power. So as a girl did you feel a bit like a second class citizen, or is it more that everyone who is not a rugby player is second class? Did you find the rugby players to be mysonginist?
I had a friend at university who went there and she spoke very highly about it, although my impression from her was the primary focus was academics - she said there were more than 20 from her year at Oxbridge.
We are talking nearly 30 years ago so appreciate the school may have changed!

Just looking at the alumni list, there are a lot of rugby players, although there are a few non-rugby players on the list that I have heard of such as Jamie Dornan!

Not just Methody although being a big successful school they are the Billybigbaws of schools rugby. Most of the other traditionally-Protestant (they all accept Catholic pupils too though these are in the minority) grammar schools are very into rugby too. I went to a grammar school down the country until the end of my GCSEs and boys' rugby was the most important thing, girls' hockey less important, everything else more or less irrelevant. The day the boys qualified for the schools' cup final you'd think they were going to pass through the gates of heaven. I remember being loaded onto a coach and sitting in the freezing cold applauding the team playing a sport I didn't know the laws of and didn't care much about. IIRC the school got stuffed by Methody in the match.
I think there is a similar culture in Leinster and probably bits of Munster. I went to uni in Dublin and a friend attended a wedding with her boyfriend, who had gone to one of those schools. During his sermon the priest made some reference to how much he was looking forward to Blackrock winning the Leinster Schools' Cup Final that weekend, to much rah rah-ing from the assembled congregation and a few cries of "Can't knock the 'Rock".
When I read about the WhatsApp group I was put in mind a bit of the Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books, with added nastiness.

Everyone is invited to worship at the altar of the 1st XV.
Oh my goodness. Was ever a truer sentence spoken?

Yes Methody is mixed (I went there to do A levels). But boys' rugby is far and away the most important extra curricular activity there. Everyone is invited to worship at the altar of the 1st XV. On the school's wikipedia page, there is a little bit of history about the school, one paragraph about how famdabbydozy they do in academic league tables, then it tells you how many times MCB have won the Schools' Cup Final and the Medallion Shield (junior boys' rugby trophy).
I got a very good education there and the school has good drama and music societies (they've won Choir of the Year about forty million times) and they are good at some other sports such as rowing. But nothing matters as much as the rugby schools' cup final.
Check out the school song on the wiki page, it's hilarious.