‘The Wiz’ inspired Canterbury stalwart
If you’dbumpedinto Brent Stuart at the end of his NRL career and told him he’d go on to becomenewzealand’s top domestic rugby league coach he’d have suggested you’d had one toomanycases of concussion. TONYSMITH reports.
Coaching was the last thing on the former Kiwis prop’s mind when he returned to Christchurch in 1998 after first-grade stints with Western Suburbs and the Illawarra Steelers.
Brent Stuart played out his premier club career here and was running around in the presidents grade when his former Kiwis cobber Gary Freeman planted the coaching seed.
‘‘I never thought of myself becoming a rugby league coach, especially with some of the things that happen to you as a player,’’ said Stuart, who is retiring from representative coaching this year after 11 years in the Canterbury Bulls and South Island Scorpions set-ups.
Stuart hadn’t seen eye-toeye with his last coach in the NRL, Ian Millward, who was running the Illawarra reserve grade team then and is now head coach of England’s Castleford Tigers.
But Freeman, who was Kiwis coach in 2001-02, came to Christchurch for the Canterbury Bulls team prizegiving and had lunch with Stuart.
‘‘Me and Wiz always got on well. He asked me if I would do one of the Canterbury junior grades teams.
‘‘So, it became a case, of ‘Gee, Wiz, I’ll think about it’.
‘‘It was probably a coincidence but I ran into Phil Prescott the next week and I mentioned to him, if he ever got the head coaching role [at the Canterbury Bulls] I’d be keen to help out,’’ Stuart recalls.
‘‘It wouldn’t even have been aweek later when Gerard Stokes pulled the pin [at the Bulls] and moved to Wellington. Phil moved up to the top job and took me under his wing.’’
Eleven years later, Stuart is stepping down after five campaigns as Prescott’s apprentice and six seasons as head coach. He’s still only 46, but has stood aside to spend more timewith his teenage son Mitchell, and wife Kay.
Stuart’s part of the last generation of Kiwis professionals to return home to pass on their knowledge at grassroots level. But he’s hit a coaching roadblock. There’s simply nothing left to win in New Zealand now. He and Prescott coached the Bulls to the 2006 Bartercard Cup title and Stuart was at the helm when the Bulls won the national provincial premiership in 2009.
He also has an unbeaten record as New Zealand Residents coach for the last three years, although Stuart – selected over Auckland-based rivals – quips: ‘‘We only played two games! Going through 2008 and 2009 unbeaten with Canterbury when we went back to regional football was a highlight.
‘‘Definitely winning the [2009] final was probably my biggest achievement, especially after playing in that same game 16 years earlier. Coming out to coach Canterbury the second time we won the national championship was a pretty special day.’’
But Stuart is quick to praise Prescott, his mentor and ‘‘one of the best coaches I’ve had’’.
‘‘I had a couple of coaches in my time I thought were pretty ordinary, but I also had some good ones, Warren Ryan [at Wests], Mal Reilly and Roger Millward [at English club Halifax], you’ve got to take the s... with the sugar. But I would have Phil up there just as good as any of them. He coached me as a player way back when I was at Addington. It was good that a guy I respected as a coach when I was playing showed me the ropes when I began coaching football teams.’’
Stuart isn’t bitter at all, but he says there is no pathway for domestic rugby league coaches. There’s only one role, the New Zealand Residents, that’s pretty much the pinnacle you can get to.
‘‘Nowadays they want all their Junior Kiwis coaches and their [Kiwis] premier coaches to come out of the NRL and [English] Super League, which is probably to be expected with the senior Kiwis coach and also now with the Junior Kiwis coming out of the Toyota Cup [NRL under-20 competition] as well.’’
So why didn’t he take his talents overseas?
Stuart says his wife ‘‘put things on the back burner’’ so he could play premier football for 17 years in New Zealand, England and Australia.
‘‘I don’t think I could do that as a coach and put them through all that again. There’s a bit of risk involved.
‘‘Just have a look at [Kiwis coach] Stephen Kearney at the moment. You can’t blame him for what’s happened at Parramatta, but unfortunately the board room normally do [blame the coach] and if you have results go against you, it could be over before you start. It’s pretty cut-throat.’’
Stuart, a freezing works stockman, says he and Kay enjoy their jobs and Mitchell is settled at his school. The family don’t want to shift from Christchurch.
Besides, he’d need to go to the New South Wales Cup or Queensland Cup semiprofessional competitions to better himself as a coach, but Stuart says the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the sunnier side of the ditch.
‘‘I’ve got mates I played with who’ve been coaching there 15 years or so, still hanging in waiting for someone to move aside . . . Getting into the Queensland Cup orNSW Cup doesn’t guarantee you’ll be up in the NRL in a helluva hurry.’’
So Stuart will honour his coaching obligations to the Hornby club until the end of next year. He doubts he’ll coach at representative level again.
He treasures his memories with the Canterbury Bulls, especially making ‘‘three finals in the Bartercard Cup under Phil’’ and the way the team evolved into the bestknown domestic rugby league brand.
But a straight-shooter of Stuart’s ilk isn’t afraid to admit the code faces challenges. A chief concern is an alarming player drop-off rate at youth level. ‘‘We’ve only got three sides in the [Canterbury] 18-years comp. That’s where a club builds their strength from . . . I don’t know what the rest of the clubs are going to do for players coming through the grades.’’
Stuart says Canterbury are losing a lot of young players to NRL contracts and many aren’t returning if they don’t make first grade. Those who do come back after tasting Toyota Cup football, are being lured to rugby union where ‘‘they get a wee bit more looked after.’’
Hence, Canterbury face the dilemma where their best senior representative players ‘‘are getting older now and we haven’t really got anything to replace them with’’.
Stuart’s heard, anecdotally that Canterbury has a total of around 150 junior and senior grade teams, but ‘‘one club in Auckland has got more sides than we have in our whole competition. That’s what the rest of New Zealand rugby league are up against’’.
Stuart’s felt the Auckland impact first-hand after enjoying the upper hand over the arch rivals for most of his career. His last assignment with the Canterbury Bulls was the Rugby League Cup defence against Auckland at the new stadium on the former Rugby League Park site at Queen’s Birthday weekend. ‘‘We picked 30 players [for a train-on squad] but out of that 30, when came down to pick our [match-day] squad of 18 players, we only had 19 left through injuries and guys pulling out for different reasons.
‘‘Go back 10 years ago, blokes would have given anything to play in that game . . . . we just picked whoever was at training and fortunately we had enough left. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when you’ve got to say that.’’
Canterbury lost 44-16 with even some of the more seasoned players finding the pace of the game at regional representative level tougher than the national zonal competition where Auckland’s strength is split between two teams.
Stuart, who hails from Hokitika and represented West Coast, has enjoyed his three-year stint with the Scorpions but isn’t convinced about the switch to zonal representative football, which had left Canterbury ‘‘in limbo’’.
‘‘I don’t really want to be disrespectful towards the South Island but the [Scorpions] side is pretty much Canterbury anyway. Most of the boys would sooner play for Canterbury than the South Island.’’
If the zonal system continues, Stuart would like to see six North Island teams and two South Island sides, ‘‘the Canterbury Bulls and the Southern Zone, being the rest of the South Island.’’
He believes rugby league was better served by the season-long Bartercard Cup concept.
Stuart points to current and former Kiwis Simon Mannering, Ben Matulino, Lewis Brown, Russell Packer, Cooper Vuna, Sam Rapira, Seitamata Sa and Thomas Leuluai as Bartercard Cup graduates along with current Warriors coach Bluey McClennan.
‘‘The beauty about it was they played that level of football all year-round. It wasn’t just six games at the end of the season. Now, come the end of the [club] season, a lot of guys can’t be bothered because they’ve just put six months effort in and [they think] ‘why go and play when you’re not going to get anything out of it?’’’
His own decision to switch to rugby league was ‘‘a nobrainer’’ after handling the ball more in one game on the West Coast ‘‘than I did in a whole year of union’’.
But he can understand why ‘‘a young kid would rather play rugby union for his school, if they’re going to tour Argentina or France for amonth’’.
Stuart would like to see a bigger programme for the New Zealand Residents team. He watched players busting their gut to make the New Zealand A team that toured England in 2003 and played a test against Great Britain.
He says there was once a three-way tournament with NSW Cup and Queensland
Triumphant: Cup selections. ‘‘But in recent years, they’ve just had a oneoff game every year for the Residents.
‘‘That is something the NZRL will need to look into if they want to keep those players interested in rugby league.’’
Stuart’s love for the game will continue to shine. He keenly follows the Warriors but remains first and foremost aWests Tigers fan – old Western Suburbs Magpies never fly too far from the nest.
But, he hopes to see a Christchurch-based NRL franchise running around AMI Stadium, ‘‘once everything settles down [after the earthquakes] and they get the city back into shape.
‘‘There’s room for two professional codes in Christchurch. It would be absolutely marvellous, not only for rugby league fans, to have the Crusaders and a NRL side from Christchurch playing here, every second weekend throughout the whole of the winter.’’