"I think the whole thing around Kelsey blew out of proportion a little bit," said Barham who is going down to Palmerston North to watch the Beko Netball League curtain-raiser match between Central Netball and SkyCity Marvels from 5pm before the Te Wananga O Raukawa Central Pulse v Magic match at 7.40pm on Monday.
Rhiarna Ferris and Kimiora Poi, of the Bay, are in the undefeated, table-topping Central Netball squad but McPhee hasn't, according to Kupa, been getting minutes on the court so playing here was equally significant in her ongoing development.
"Tammy was angry about it and it probably fired them up for the game and that perhaps made it an even better battle which isn't such a bad thing.
"The game's at the heart of what we do and I think that's what we should always keep in mind."
Barham says she had spoken with McPhee and, sometimes, people only heard one part of the story.
"There's always what's better for the game so it's timely to review our rules because there were some good outcomes, I thought," says the Woodford House PE teacher.
She said when she contacted Hawke's Bay Netball operations manager Tina Arlidge she was quite good about it and went "Oh, shucks".
"It would have been good to raise the issues before the game rather than after. The worst thing would have been playing the game, not knowing the rules and that's not how I roll."
Barham herself had three players who were flirting with eligibility rules surrounding the shield final after just three rounds.
"In the rules at the start of the season we agreed on a new format and, of course, Otane took it the wrong way."
Jaydi Taylor-Chaffey and Asher Grapes, for example, had returned from being part of the Aotearoa Maori Secondary Schools netball team competing in Suva, Fiji, last week and also were technically ineligible to play for Napier Girls' High School and Hastings Girls' High School, respectively.
"So they adapted the rules to what was best for the game and they were allowed to play and that was the best outcome, I thought," she says, emphasising those who represent the code at the higher echelons shouldn't be penalised for it.
But as a coach, Barham does her due diligence so the timing was imperative and she didn't want to turn up to the court to confront matters pertaining to players who could run on court minutes before the final.
"It was a good battle, a great game on Friday night - really good, solid, competitive."
Competitions, says Barham, have to be fair as well as an ideal platform for developing the raw talent on display in the region.
"That allows for players who are coming back but how does that work?
"They are questions to answers we don't know yet so they are the areas we need to explore."
It's a problem HB Netball had never dealt with before.
Barham says every team should enjoy the privilege of knowing who they are coming up against in a final.
Arlidge says the rules were set up for normal end-of-season playoffs and not for the abrupt shield format so they needed to be updated to ensure it was fair to everybody.
"Some teams would have had four to five players ineligible and there were finals right across," she says.
Arlidge says McPhee's injection was "100 per cent fair" because she was registered to play with Otane for years.
"It was probably just the timing but if Kelsey is available why wouldn't you play her?" she says, But she doesn't feel any opposition teams should be notified early about who's playing.
What is vital is scrutinising the quality of players at that level so rules will be tidied up for next year.
"What we need to do is learn from this and move on. This is the round now [post-shield] that everyone will play each other," she says, happy the new format provided a non-championship round structure to encourage more competition.
