Teens named for academy
Seven Taranaki high school leavers are among the latest round of recruits into the region’s rugby academy.
Fourteen players have been named in the G&H Training Bulls Academy intake for 2019, including former New Plymouth Boys’ High School players Daniel Rona, Kristian Gent-Standen, Adam Smith, Reece Gray and Jahmarl Hapi and Francis Douglas Memorial College players Nathanial Peters and Jordan Roylance.
Notable selections from outside the region include New Zealand Secondary School representatives Josh Lord and Lukas Halls.
Lord, who is more than 2m tall, attended Hamilton Boys’ High School this year and played a key role in its 1st XV as well as pulling on the silver fern for the New Zealand Secondary Schools team in 2018. Halls, born in Taranaki, will come home after playing in the midfield for King’s College in Auckland’s 1A schools competition and representing the New Zealand Secondary School Barbarians.
Other key recruits include Blues U18 representatives Cru- sader Faletagoai (tight head prop) and Josh Jacomb (first five-eighth) from Sacred Heart along with Millennium Sanerivi (hooker) from Kings College.
Halfback Standen and midfielder Rona have been selected after standing out for Boys’ High this year. Rona was selected in the CMK Taranaki sevens team and played a key role at the National Sevens recently.
Academy manager David Ormrod was happy with next year’s intake, which will benefit several areas of Taranaki Rugby.
‘‘The academy’s aim is to produce players for the Yarrows Taranaki Bulls but, while in the academy, the players will take part in CMK club rugby and the Under 19 and AICA Development representative programmes.’’
Ormrod said during the year, players would undergo sessions based on the six key pillars of rugby development – technical, tactical, physical, nutrition, psychological and professional development.
The year two players are Tevita Fa’ukafa, Tupou Vaa’i, Kaylum Boshier, Kini Naholo, Isaac Kneepkens, Josh Setu, Michael Loft, Jahmarl Weir, Josh Thompson, Toby Burkett and Brent Tucker. After five minutes of racing around the track, driver Luke Duthie pulls into the pit lane and his mechanic fills up his car and sees if the tyres need a change.
Moments later, the 25-year-old sends the vehicle screaming back out on the track to complete the 45-minute race.
The Taranaki man is one of the best racing drivers of his type in the country – so good that he recently became the first Kiwi in more than 40 years to clinch one of Australia’s top events.
But don’t expect to see him park up and get out of his racing car – he takes to the track with a radio-controlled machine that’s 1⁄8th the size of a real motorsport vehicle. He’s not long back from across the ditch, where he won the 1⁄8th scale category in the Radio Controlled IC-Onroad Australian Championships.
After the first lap of the final race he was in second to last place, but made his way up to first after the leader’s engine blew up.
Even after that happened and Duthie was two laps ahead of his nearest challenger, he didn’t assume he ‘‘had it in the bag’’.
‘‘Never count it until it’s done,’’ he says. ‘‘Luckily I was able to bring it home.’’
The award-winning driver has been racing since he was five years old, following in his father Selwyn’s footsteps. He’s been to the world championships in Brazil and France and regularly enters the Australian and New Zealand nationals. He trains with his race car once a year in Christchurch because he says no other tracks in New Zealand are of a high enough quality.
Duthie said he and other New Zealand competitors had been aiming to win an Australian title since the Aussies won one here eight years ago.
‘‘We really wanted to have one of us fellas win it,’’ Duthie said. ‘‘It’s been our mission to win it back.’’