Rawinia Everitt is planting seeds

To grow a forest of mighty Kauri wāhine

Rawinia Everitt (Te Aupouri, Ngāti Kuri, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou, Kuki Airani) calls me from the back of the van. Krystal Murray is driving them south, the two and half hour trip to Whangārei. The picture bounces around as they dodge bad patches of road and reception. Everitt is speaking of the seeds she’s sowing in her new role as Kauri head coach. It’s a part she has been auditioning for ever since this prodigal daughter returned home to Te Tai Tokerau.

Everitt as a coach is just as she was as a player. She carries hard for her team, doing what many may think impossible. Her pre-season for this Farah Palmer Cup has been years in the making. Having been involved in the establishment of three of the women’s clubs of the far North, she is now activating the community she has helped build.

Everitt has split the vast geography of Te Tai Tokerau in three. Establishing hubs in Kaitaia, Kaikohe and Whangārei. Each hub is led by local leaders and supported by Northland Rugby staff. As a result, they only come together once a week as a full team to train. It’s a high trust model they are experimenting with this season. Should it prove successful, Everitt hopes it can be replicated for other representative teams in the region. Enabling players to spend more time on the grass than the road.

This model comes from her experiences with the Te Tai Tokerau Natives. In order for Everitt to confidently call herself the Northland head coach, she had to make sure their team was connected to all parts of the region. Ensuring her people didn’t need to leave their communities in order to represent them.

But it’s not just the infrastructure that Everitt is building this season. It is the culture. It is the heart. Who better to speak to that than Everitt herself? So here is the conversation we had, in her own words.

Theresa Fitzpatrick (left) and Rawinia Everitt (right) share a laugh on the eve of last year’s World Cup semi final. Rawinia, Black Fern #162, was invited present the Black Ferns their jerseys ahead of the match.

Alice: And so you quit your job, bro. You've gone all in? 

Rawinia: Yooooo! I quit. I resigned like two weeks ago. It was a bundle of things.

I think there's no expectation, but there is. I've been given this opportunity, do I do it this small or this small or this big you know? And who knows, I'm a big one on ‘what if this is my last time?’ So give it everything. I resigned and now I don't know what I'm doing. Because it's only like 15k for the whole year. And I've felt like I've already done $50,000 worth of driving. 

I did it for my own self as well to be honest. I think it just exploded where you realise things could be better in other areas. And then I'm like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I chose the stuff that I don't even get paid for’. Whereas I left the job that probably, you know, creates all of that and allows all that other stuff. So I'm probably gonna wake up in two weeks time and go what the hell have I done? 

But you can't unsee things and that’s why I made the decision. I’m telling a lot of kids to take their opportunity, so I have to too. Whether this is the pinnacle of my coaching, I'm not too fussed. Because there’s other things that people don’t get acknowledged for that do probably just as much, if not more, than what a coach does.  Like managerial, the bus drivers and whatnot, who don't get acknowledged but if you don’t have these people, how are you going to do what you need to do? 

Coaching is about creating the space on multiple levels - that's the key and the hardest part. For a Black Fern and Northland player, making them feel like they're all achieving. Not many people can do that. It's a fine art to be able to deliver it to all those levels. You get Black Ferns, who turn up and you need to bring them back down. Give them a little gentle reminder of where it all began.

Back in the day, we could all get there. At your club, if you had ten new players, you could inspire them so much that they would say “Oh I wanna be a Black Fern now”. But the gaps are getting bigger. The Black Ferns have been given all this knowledge, you get to smash your body and you get to recover it nicely the next day. All these girls are training every day so you’ve got to be crazy good to break in now.

That makes the work in our communities at the grassroots, all the more important. Because we have to uplift our talent and hold it even higher now. All that effort needs to be reciprocated by the union to make everything we are building sustainable. We need them to invest the resources into those that are investing their talent into our game. 

Muzza’s iconic quote from the Kaitaia victory parade after last year’s World Cup

I have a huge fight for player welfare and how we're going about that these days. We've learned some things in my time and you're trying not to do all that you've learned. You're not gonna get everything right all the time but you’re not going to repeat the cycle if you've seen it hurt somebody. Reflection is very, very necessary. Player selection is very different these days to where we grew up. I was coached by Davida White, so it was very black and white. It was “You didn’t make it cause you weren’t good enough.” and we accepted just that because we knew. We were talking amongst our peers and having honest conversations. 

There’s so many mediums now of feedback. You give them a book, write it down. You go and have conversations but then you also have video. You also got supporters. But ultimately it’s self awareness. If you’re self aware, you don’t go overboard and ridicule yourself that you’re a shitty player. It’s just the basics of picking two attacking and two defence goals and asking yourself - did I achieve them? Going back to that basic stuff, not putting a whole X through your face and making it a dartboard.

So it’s ensuring the comms are safe, that’s what I’m learning cause I haven’t been in high performance for seven years. It’s pretty much the same but things have gotten faster and there’s more technology. But you have to remember, you are you, right? And you need to come wholeheartedly as you. And now that I look at it, each individual you have to treat like that, not a number. 

The talent coming through is sick right. Physically, friggin heck, there's some machines out there. We are trusting these younger ones with leadership roles. What's starting to happen is the average age is going to be a bit younger than what it used to be. And that's not a bad thing, it's just that we're getting them younger so whoever is coaching them or in the management space, probably needs to do a little bit more upskilling around what it takes to drive youth. What support do they need to climb the ladder? Back in the days it was just gas vouchers and a bit of a feed here and there. But now, they need time, they need to talk it over and understand. They need to be free of judgement. 

You’re getting a lot more of that type of player that have big personalities that didn’t used to be accepted. You’d only have two of us but now you are seeing way more personality come through. It’s allowed, it’s accepted and it’s friggin cool. But everyone else around them needs to upskill because how do we allow them to keep expressing and keep those who are quite introverted to still be able to do what they want to do. 

And that’s your kawa, your culture. That's why buddy sessions are important, so that everybody wins. We tried something different this year to revert back to indigenous practices to try and find a better version. We had to try something different because this team has had a magical team on paper nearly every year and can't come up with the goods. 

The Northland Kauri gather at 90 Mile Beach during their first Wānanga (Photo via Native Sports Performance)

Our first camp we took the girls out because it’s Pūanga, our Matariki right? So we did a release down at the beach. And the main thing I had in mind were those girls that made Kauri but were from that team which was controversially removed from the club competition. So we did it on an outgoing tide, we had a tohunga come in and say a karakia. We had kūmara that was burning on the fire and just reverted back to some old practices that our tupuna did. It was very different, it was all new for everyone. The girls that said they didn’t have issues to let go, actually did and so it affected everyone individually. 

It brings me back to when I was in the Ferns and how I’m a coach now and how I deliver. It’s because I’ve learnt something. I wasn’t allowed to do all of this or dive into any of this then because it wasn’t the ‘normal’. They didn’t know what it was so they didn’t have control over it. I didn’t even acknowledge that I was Māori sometimes because it wasn’t cool. We only acknowledged it when we did the haka a couple of times on tour.

Whereas as a coach I thought, I’m going to try it and see what happens. And the girls were like “Oh I’m so happy we did that with this team because now I know how to be the best player for the Kauri.” 

We were given a new haka which we learnt and some new skills. We did a hautapu as well because some of us lost whānau. So we tried all this different stuff but it was mainly about connection. We often think we are there for rugby but it’s not that. Often, we are there for each other. 

As much as we don’t want to admit to that, it’s really that I do this because I need a conversation or I need to feel worthy of something. You’re bullshitting if you say you’re just there to coach rugby or you’re there to play, it’s more than that. You just can’t see it for what it is. I wish that some of our health providers would see that this is a space of prevention. Sport is so underrated for that, no matter what the code is. It’s a space of inclusion, socialising. As much as people say they want to go off grid, it’s not all year round. As much as you get sick of people, you also need people too. 

I have been loving the journey so far. I did think Northland were going to say something but you look at our team and in terms of connection, we are predominantly Māori and we acknowledge our Pacific sisters and Pākehā sisters too. Our language, it’s not just one sided and Māori, it’s everyone. And that just comes down to our core value of respect. 

It takes a lot of time, you need to have a good management team around you. I’m lucky that I’ve got Muzza (Krystal Murray) as my set piece coach, TK (Te Kura Ngata-Aerengamate) as defensive and Aros (Aroha Savage) as my attack. And I did that blatantly to show Northland Rugby that we need to acknowledge these girls cause we’ve been doing it forever. We are moving into an era now where women’s rugby needs women coaches. 

Rana Paraha aka Auntie Rana, celebrates last year as the Northland Rugby Union unveiled the new women’s club trophy named in her honour (Photo via Hora Hora Women’s Rugby)

The way I selected my coaching team wasn’t on skills or certs. We have a coach, we call her the Tai Tuara, the backbone. That’s Auntie Rana, the matriarch of Northland Rugby. I’ve got 33 players, I don’t have 33 eyes. She looks for glitches where she can see the drops in their mauri and how they’re feeling. Auntie Rana wipes tears, listens when they don’t feel heard.

When you’re trying to bring in some babies to be amongst some of Northland’s best like the TK, Muzza, Aroz and Hikitia (Hikitia Wikaira), making sure they are okay amongst the chaos of one training a week is a must. Aunty Rana is perfect for that role but it’s something the union is still grappling to understand. 

I’m absolutely loving it with the girls, they’re a massive support. It’s all about trust and they gotta know your style and your vision. If this is my last year, I want to get it in a direction where we are better at acknowledging women and are really not afraid to go dive deep in indigenous practices as well. Because that’s who we are. That’s your power.

That’s all it is. It’s believing, really believing, in that superpower. Because sometimes the system makes us not believe in it or it tries to drive it out. So it's about believing that you are good enough. If you tap into that more and be a more complete version of you, imagine the player you could be. 

In the end our goal is to connect the Kauri to communities all over Te Tai Tokerau. Even if they don't have someone they know in the Kauri, they do. We are all their daughters, nieces, sisters and mokopuna.

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Alice again, if that doesn’t make you want to cheer on the Kauri this season, I don’t know what will! They have two more matches of the round robin before playoffs and they are currently sitting third on the table due to points differentials. Make sure you get along to catch them in action.

12.05pm Saturday 12 August versus Taranaki Whio (currently sitting 6th)
Kaikohe Rugby Club or live on Sky Sport 2

2.05pm Saturday 19 August versus Tasman (currently ranked 2nd)
Landsdowne Park or live on Sky Sport

With you,

Alice