Mavericks usher in a new age

The Te Hiku Mavericks celebrated a successful debut campaign in the Taitokerau Rugby League competition over the weekend.

The two day celebration began with players gathering for an official team photograph on Friday night before holding their end-of-season prizegiving on Saturday.

The Mavericks had made their intentions clear long before the third TRL competition even kicked off. Word of the approach the new side was going to bring to proceedings quickly spread throughout the Far North league community.

At one of those early training sessions, Mavericks founder Conor O’Sullivan said the goal was to return Kaitaia to being a powerhouse of the 13-man game.

“We really want a team to lift the professionalism of the competition, [it’s been a] bit too grassroots,” O’Sullivan said at a pre-season.

The reference was that while the TRL had been nothing less than phenomenally successful during its first two seasons, some teams and their supporters were still behaving inappropriately on and off the field.

The Mavericks set about reconfiguring a new benchmark by recruiting two of the best coaches in the business, Jim Larkin and Vince ‘Tini’ Rudolph, pooling some of Kaitaia’s best players — many former teammates and standouts with the Kaitaia College 1st XV and XIII teams earlier this decade — and instigating a gruelling pre-season training and fitness regime last year.

The side began its inaugural A commitment to both defence and attack and a collective vision towards raising the standard of the grassroots competition saw Te Hiku Mavericks emerge as comfortable winners of the 2018 Taitokerau Rugby League Premiership. Here Mavericks founder Conor O’Sullivan (on right) puts his shoulder to the wheel during the match against the 2017 champions, Ngati Kahu Sharks, at Waipapakauri earlier this year.