COMMENT:
Rugby in New Zealand can tear communities and families apart. For one provincial player who decided, against his wife's wishes, to play against the 1981 apartheid era Springboks, it meant a couple of lonely months sleeping chastely on a sofa in the living room.
It can also bring huge joy and unity. During the 2011 World Cup Martin Snedden, head of the tournament's organising committee, and Steve Tew, the NZRU's chief executive, missed a turn travelling from New Plymouth to Hamilton. They drove into the little King Country town of Bennydale, population 200. Pinned to every one of the 20 lampposts in the main street was a hand painted caricature of a rugby player.
What role does rugby play now? Do the dire headlines suggesting the sport at the grassroots is mortally wounded reflect reality?
My personal litmus test for the state of rugby at school and club level has always been what's happening in my hometown of Waihi. I spent five years at high school there in the 1960s, when the local club, Waihi Athletic, would draw several hundred spectators on Saturday afternoons to Rugby Park, and Waihi College fielded four teams that played in a thriving Thames Valley competition.
But times change, and when rugby stopped being literally the only sporting option in a smaller town, it was no surprise that a serious rugby malaise arrived in Waihi.
The Athletic club was basically saved from bankruptcy, a late schoolmate, Phil Mulhern, told me early in the 1990s, by the introduction of touch football in the summer. By the end of the '90s at the college they were down to one rugby team, that played the occasional non-competition game.
But what's happened in the last 20 years to rugby in Waihi has been remarkable. It at once provides a homegrown blueprint for survival in a professional age, but is also a cautionary tale of how fragile the commitment to rugby can be in a typical Kiwi country town of 4500 people.
What amounted to a revolution started at the college, where the school broke a 40 year drought and in 2007 won the Thames Valley First XV competition. In 2018, for the first time in the club's history, Waihi Athletic were the Valley champions. Fourteen of the winning club side were products of the college.
So what happened?
One. A group of good keen men and women got together to run things at the school. At the head of a dynamic rugby resurgence from 1999, was Ross Cooper, a fromer head coach at the Chiefs, whose rugby career took him onto John Hart's coaching staff on the triumphant 1996 All Black tour of South Africa. Out of professional rugby, he returned to his old calling, working as a fulltime teacher at Waihi College. "It started with Ross," says the school's headmaster Alistair Cochrane. "When you get key people in key roles with passion and drive they can turn things around."
Two. They started small, with one college team of 13 and 14 year olds. At first Cooper had fellow teacher John Rautenbach, caretaker Matty Matich, a life member of the Athletic club, and school board chairman Peter Spiers working beside him, instilling hard core tenents of trust, and hard work. Values were treasured. The kids signed protocols outlining what was expected of them. In the first year one of the team's best players was suspended for misbehaving at school. "We stood him down," says Cooper, "and we refused to play him in the final." Years later the boy would swear to Cooper that while the lesson was tough, it would actually change his life for the better.
Three. They thought big. What had been a one off sports' trip to Australia in the 1990s became a bi-annual trip known as Rugnet where the school's top rugby and netball teams headed across the Tasman. Somehow they raised $100,000 from the town to pay the travel costs.
Four. They engaged with the community, finding each player an individual sponsor. In return the kids had to work for a week during the holidays for their sponsor. "Some of the town kids weren't too keen on the farm work, but they went and grubbed thistles," says Cooper. He laughs. "Our own son Sam worked for Pete Spiers' electrical company in his holidays. Guess what Sam is now? He's an electrician."
Five. They forged strong links with the local club. "Part of the culture was that it wasn't just a Waihi College team, it was becoming a Waihi team," says principal Cochrane.
"We became the feeder for Waihi Athletic. In 2018, when they won the Thames Valley championship there was only one player that hadn't come out of our First XV." Brett Ranga, the gifted loose forward who in '18 also led Thames Valley to a Meads Cup championship victory, and last year captained the national Heartland XV, cut his leadership teeth as captain of the college First XV.
So far so extraordinary. But Cooper has retired, and Rautenbach is now the headmaster of Taumarunui High School. Others who toiled for rugby have gone too.
"These are tougher times now," says Cochrane. "It's three years since Ross has gone, and it's not working so well now. Such a lot depends on having really passionate people to drive things. We were very fortunate to have such a group."
Cochrane wants to do everything he can to regain what he calls "the terrific buzz" the school felt when well organised school teams set off for Australia.
Cooper hopes for that too. Musing this week about the future he hopes will be bright for rugby in Waihi he doesn't sugar coat what's involved in the organisation and coaching of young sportspeople. "It's a shitload of work." He pauses. "But it really is incredibly rewarding."
New All Black captain Sam Cane was a nervous 21-year-old in just his second year as an All Black in 2013 when he was called in to join the players' leadership group. But what Steve Hansen and Ian Foster saw in him was a maturity beyond his years. Was his store of commonsense built up from playing with adults as a teenager, just 18 when he first played for Bay of Plenty? Maybe not.
Two years ago Cane told me how working with his father, Malcolm, on the family deer farm near Reporoa probably shaped him a lot more than sport. When he was just 13 and 14, he learned to take on adult responsibilities.
"I helped Dad out on the farm. Then, when I got good at something, he'd actually pay me to do the job. He would say, 'you're doing good work for me, so you deserve to get paid for it'. But it wasn't until I got to a level where I was worthy of it that I got paid.
"Whether it was tractor work, pulling down fences, feeding out, whatever it was. I did plenty for nothing, but when there was a big job to be done I had a responsibility to complete those jobs."
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