Sorting between the ears
Flat patches are fine if you’re cooking pancakes or navigating the Pacific, but not if your sports team is firing blanks. Help can be at hand. Fifteen years ago players would have turned a deaf ear to wordsmiths such as Manawatu¯ man Luke Rowe – and it seems the fluctuating Warriors in the NRL still do.
Remember how recently they were trounced 36-4 by Penrith’s second-stringers at Penrith and nine days later dismembered the Broncos by 26-6.
One factor in that might also be the upset to the Warriors’ bio-rhythms and although their transtasman flights are of only three-to-four-hours duration, they do cross a time zone every two weeks.
Despite that, their erratic results cry out for further neurological examination, for someone to delve between players’ ears without using scalpels.
As far as Manawatu¯ teams are concerned, that man might be Rowe, a 36-year-old blossoming sports psychologist treading a similar path to Olympics sports psychologist Gary Hermansson 20 years ago. Rowe proved himself this season with Manawatu¯ club rugby champions Feilding Old Boys-o¯ roua.
They had two matches that left their coaches nonplussed and yet, after Rowe’s involvement, they peeled off seven straight wins to glory.
One early dud was at Rongotea when the Stags were over-run by Te Kawau. The second was their sole loss in round two, 49-12 to College Old Boys.
After that one, coach Glen Gregory decided something had to change. He pored long and hard over the match videotape and found little amiss with the rugby part.
So he invited Rowe in from the team’s periphery to weave his verbal magic every Tuesday. Physical training was consigned to Thursdays.
Rowe was a Feilding Old Boys lock between 2001 and 2005 when studying clinical psychology at Massey University. Now, he lectures in it while also working for Te Tihi Wha¯ nau Ora (Ma¯ ori family health) and Central Primary Health in the mental health sector.
His other passion is sport. He played for the Manawatu¯ Development XV and was in the 1998-99 Hato Pa¯ ora College first XV alongside Hayden Triggs and Manawatu¯ Rugby Union chief Shannon Paku.
Rowe has done health and wellbeing work for the NRL where he said 50 per cent of the players were brown and his findings didn’t prove popular, and he has also worked on NZ Rugby’s Headfirst campaign. In 2016, when the NZ Under-20 rugby team were clipped second game up, coach Razor Robertson called Rowe to Britain to help.
On June 5, he set to work on the Stags’ heads. He focused on the club identity, what the jersey and club crest meant (and few of them knew), playing for each other and their community. He equated the huia feathers on the crest with the team’s swarming defence that forced opponents to kick.
He also stressed playing honourably, as in no boofheads on and off the field. After games he stressed never to let the jersey touch the ground – ‘‘a deep disrespect to the jersey’’.
Most satisfying to Rowe after the club final was seeing the players sweeping the changing room before they departed. It all added up.
He agreed teams back in his day wouldn’t have had a bar of it, but the 2018 version took it in. It was his way of giving back to the club.
Rowe focused on the club identity, what the jersey and club crest meant, playing for each other and their community . . . He also stressed playing honourably, as in no boofheads on and off the field.
Netball final in Outer Mongolia
Signals from Wellington have suggested Central Pulse supporters might have to fly to the national netball final in far-flung Palmerston North on Sunday and squeeze into a ‘‘small’’ stadium.
With Wellington’s venues unavailable, the message seemed to be that the game was moved to the wops-wops, requiring a journey of transsiberian proportions.
And worse, players would be yanked out of their home beds to play in front of a mere 2300 bumpkins. The cheek of it.
The questions to Netball NZ might have gone like this:
Q: ‘‘Have the Pulse played in Palmy?’’
A: ‘‘On the Super Sunday in May. We are baffled they escaped with their lives from the experience.’’ Q: ‘‘Why aren’t they named the Wellington Pulse anyway?’’
A: ‘‘Because Palmy is the centre of Central.’’
Q: ‘‘Do they have seats up there?’’
A: ‘‘The locals get by on beer crates and upturned buckets.’’
Q: ‘‘Why can’t the teams fly to Palmerston North?’’ A: ‘‘Because the pilots might not find Palmy and might have to zoom on to Hamilton.’’
Q: ‘‘Is it too risky driving the team up there by road?’’
A: ‘‘Sure is. But they might have the new bridge south of Foxton finished by Sunday.’’
Q: ‘‘Has broadband reached there yet?’’
A: ‘‘No, but they have promised to roll out a brass band.’’
Q: ‘‘Where will the players sleep the night before the final?’’
A: ‘‘Netball Manawatu¯ has promised to string up hammocks in the local motor camp.’’
Q: ‘‘So what is the advantage of staging the final in Palmerston North?’’
A: ‘‘It’s so coach Yvette Mcausland-durie doesn’t have to travel.’’
Q: ‘‘Haven’t they got anything bigger up there?’’ A: ‘‘Yes, but Bunnings has first dibs on it.’’