Tauranga junior coach Lance Potaka says New Zealand has an international reputation for underwater hockey. "We're the country to beat. We'd have to be the top country in the world. Everyone goes to the worlds wanting to beat New Zealand."
Rotorua's Helen Payn also played underwater hockey for New Zealand in Spain for the women's U19 team. The 19-year-old is a former Rotorua Girls' High School student attending university in Wellington. Shields is a 17-year-old Year 13 student at Western Heights High School. Like Shields, she belongs to the East Bay Underwater club.
People of all ages, shapes and sizes can play underwater hockey. Mandy Shields says, "You don't have to be ultra-fit. You just have to be able to hold your breath."
Potaka says underwater hockey players develop tremendous lung capacity. "When they start, they're just down there kicking until they run out of breath. Our senior girls do a static breath hold two minutes, just warming up. I talked to a guy who used to hold his breath four minutes."
Underwater hockey is played on the bottom of the pool with a plastic puck (weighing around 1.4 kilograms) and a short stick. According to the World Underwater Federation website, the British Navy invented underwater hockey in the 1950s to keep divers fit and improve their ability to work under water. The sport is played in a 25 metre pool between 2 and 4 metres deep.
The game consists of 15-minute halves with six players in the pool at a time per team. Players wear large fins, a diving mask and snorkel and a thick latex glove. When the referee sounds the buzzer, both teams race for possession of the puck. Players must shoot the puck through a goal tray at the back wall to score.
East Bay club secretary and player Coral Dolman says the game can get rough. "It's classified as a non-contact sport, which we all laugh at, because when you think contact, you think rugby. It's not meant to be body contact, but there will be times when you get a fin in the face or puck in the eye."
Most people will never see the rough-and-tumble, or any other part of the game. "It's not a spectator sport," says NZ U19 representative and Tauranga Girls' College student Kirsty Burrows. "No one can watch. People think we have lead boots or long hockey sticks" (they have neither). Players wear snorkels to avoid bringing their heads above water to breathe. "It's hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's second nature," says Burrows.
Athletes training for international competitions pull long hours. Some clock 12 training sessions in the pool per week for an hour to an hour-and-a-half each time.
Commitment for parents of athletes in these niche, mostly self-funded, sports is substantial. A good mask and fins can cost hundreds of dollars (beginners can borrow gear). Travel costs mount quickly. Coral Dolman says parents of top underwater hockey players spend six to eight thousand dollars every two years for international competitions. "Trying to keep them in as adults is the hard part. Once they leave home, mum and dad stop paying for tournaments."
Shields says her family spent around $8000 getting Simon to the Worlds.
Underwater hockey can be a family sport as well. Dolman says she started at age 8 or 9 and still competes at age 34.
"My father plays. Both sisters play. It's awesome getting to play on the same teams. That's the beauty of the sport - you can have a 12-year-old and a 65-year-old play on same team competitively and in a national tournament." Synchronised swimming is another niche sport requiring time, treasure and talent from athletes and families. Four Tauranga athletes - Sarsha Younger, Eva Morris, Jazzlee Thomas and Amy Lowans - along with coaches Julieta Diaz and Suzanne Ribeiro, travelled to Spain, Switzerland and Russia this winter to compete in the Spanish Open, Swiss Open and Fina World Champs.
At Worlds, they narrowly missed qualifying for the 2016 Olympics.
Tauranga Synchronised Swimming chairperson Shirley Hooper says winning a spot at the Olympics among 45 countries at the World Champs would've been a fairy tale come true. "For the first time [at Worlds] to finish 17th, we're pretty happy with that. Unfortunately, we got beaten. It was a big goal to qualify for the Olympics. You must be the top Oceania nation, and Australia finished 16th. They've been training a lot longer."
Members of the national team - the Aquaferns - train 35-40 hours a week, split between pool and gym. Synchro is a demanding sport likened to underwater rugby, with flying swimmers, plus stray arms and legs. The team reports three black eyes and a concussion the past six months.
Synchronised swimming combines swimming, dance and gymnastics. Competitors hold their breath underwater while doing turns, lifts and leaps as part of a choreographed routine set to music. Nose clips help swimmers stay upside down in the pool. While athletes can hear music through underwater speakers, they synchronise by counts. Synchro swimmers can hold their breath on average three minutes.
Hooper describes the sport as "running a marathon while holding your breath upside down in water." She says, "You need endurance and lung capacity, because you're upside down doing incredible moves." Athletes also need strength. They're judged partly on how high they can get out of the water. Hooper says an endurance test of Olympic athletes showed synchro swimmers second only to marathon runners. Hooper says it's not water ballet.
"It's an incredibly tough sport. They're on a quest for perfection. As opposed to netball and underwater hockey, they might win, but they're always pushing themselves to get a little more perfect."
They're also jostling for dollars. Like underwater hockey, synchro is self-funded. Hooper says a six-month competition campaign, which includes hiring pool space, employing strength and conditioning trainers, nutritionists, plus funding airfare and overseas travel, comes in under $20,000, with some contributions from national and international synchro organisations, plus corporate sponsorship. "They fund as best they can, but the big commitment comes from parents, as it does for any niche sport."
Sarsha Younger is the senior Tauranga swimmer in the Aquaferns and a team captain. Younger says she's "very lucky to have been supported by my family". The 23-year-old has been involved in synchro 10 years, after taking gymnastics and ballet. "You have to be 100 per cent dedicated. I train a lot and don't have time for much else." When I ask what she does when she's not doing synchro, Younger laughs and replies, "I'm never not doing synchro. This year, it was just sleeping and recovering. We were training 40 hours a week." Younger says she'll pause next year to study nursing at the Polytech, but is focusing on nationals next month in Dunedin. "It's actually a very athletic sport. You have to be incredibly fit and it's nowhere near as easy as it looks."
A Seven Sharp story in June shows the Aquaferns' grace above water: smiling lips, flashing legs, pointed toes. Stamina and grit lie below the surface as swimmers form pyramids underwater, with layers of girls launching the 'flyer' from the water for somersaults. Hooper says it's a "feat of engineering".
Jokes about nose clips and 'soggy gymnastics' aside, synchro is serious. And while the Aquaferns missed a chance for the Rio Olympics next year, they say the next World Champs, in 2019, aren't far off. Hooper says, "Every four years, we end up in a quest for the ultimate dream. If we ever sent a New Zealand synchro team [to the Olympics], it would be interesting to see what reaction we got from the New Zealand public. I'm sure you'd have people saying it's not a sport. As they get up in the sport, you have a massive respect for what they do. There's such a lot of discipline."