A Drug Free Sport New Zealand educator visited the school yesterday to outline the Good Clean Sport — Youth programme, a scheme which outlines what young athletes need to look out for in their sport.
The programme is run along similar lines to ones used overseas and has been offered to schools around the country.
As the sports world becomes more professional and the rewards become higher, the pressure on young people to succeed through any means possible gets higher.
The programme outlines ways young athletes can avoid the temptations of drugs such as by checking supplements and what is in them on the Drug Free Sport New Zealand website.
Medications can be checked through texting to a service.
The resource aims to help the athlete to compete clean and help promote the importance and values of clean sport.
Otago Boys’ High School high performance sports director Ryan Martin said the school was taking a proactive approach to drug education in sport.
"These are really good messages for our boys. We can do as much as possible but we can’t control what can be done online," Martin said.
The school had developed a high performance course — which gained NCEA credits — and pupils can achieve high performance standards.
Martin said the school had produced more than 40 athletes into professional sport in the past six years and had 23 boys play in the New Zealand schools rugby team or New Zealand Barbarians rugby team in the same period, the highest of any school in New Zealand.
Martin said the course recognised there were career pathways in sports and this sort of drug-free sport education carried out yesterday was invaluable.
The school had begun the sporting year in good style, with seven national representatives or champions in their sports over the past two months.
They were Scott Tisdall (rodeo), Anton Schroder, Liam Turner (athletics), Max Chu, Hunter Kindley, Ben Lockrose (cricket) and Hamish Walker (curling).
