Bowls beat basketball

IN TUNE WITH YOUTH: Steph Beattie has enjoyed coaching youngsters, and sees a link back to her experience looking after four younger brothers after school while her parents were out working. Picture by Paul Rickard

Steph Beattie initially turned up her nose at her mother’s invitation to join her bowls team.

It was 1988. Inspector Morse was in its second year on television screens and Margaret Thatcher had become the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century.

“I used to go along and watch Mum and Dad and my husband Dave play bowls, but I was still very involved in basketball,” Steph Beattie said.

“Then Mum was put up to skip a team and she was looking for someone to come and lead.

“She said I could do it and I said, ‘No, it’s an old ladies’ game’.

“Mum kept on at me, ‘Come down and try it’. So I went down for a couple of sessions with her and Dad.

“I was super fit from playing basketball but what got me was the mental challenge. I said I’d give it a go for 12 months. Well, I loved it.

“I loved basketball, too, and carried on playing for four or five years, until I thought I was getting past running up and down a court; I’d walk up and down a bowling green instead.”

Steph (Stephenie) Beattie is widely known in the bowls community as “Bobbie”, a family nickname that had its beginnings when Steph was an infant.

“My elder sister Patricia couldn’t say ‘bubbie’; she would say ‘bobbie’. The reason I am known as ‘Bobbie’ at bowls is that Mum used that name when she introduced me to the bowlers. Some of them knew me from basketball and still called me Steph, but at bowls I’m usually called Bobbie.”

The decision to concentrate on bowls as her sporting interest led to Steph’s broadened playing experience through outside tournaments, an interest in teaching youngsters the basics of bowls, her promotion of umpiring as a worthwhile interest and her contribution to the administration of the centre.

These combined activities have led to her election as a life member of Bowls Gisborne-East Coast.

Although Steph was a reluctant recruit to the code, she had an ideal bowls pedigree. Her parents were both keen, “very good” bowlers.

Her father, Alton “Tinnie” Ashwell (he was considered lucky in his youth), won several major centre tournaments, including the Burton Cup.

Her mother, Molly Ashwell, played at the Riverside Women’s Bowling Club and had a strong team.

“I was very lucky,” Steph said. “I played with Mum and her team, and we travelled a lot. That helped me learn what other people could do and how to read a game.”

In those days, Gisborne’s female bowlers were organised as a sub-centre of Hawke’s Bay. It meant a lot of interaction with Hawke’s Bay and places further afield for the serious bowler.

“We had six clubs; Hawke’s Bay had 24,” she said.

“You learned a lot by doing that travelling outside the district.”

Male and female bowlers in Gisborne amalgamated to form the Gisborne-East Coast centre in 1996. Steph was on the centre board from 1996 to 2017, serving as vice-president for a term. She also served as centre tournament convener.

In the late 1990s, Steph was one of three Gisborne bowlers who got into the New Zealand School of Excellence under Bowls New Zealand director of coaching John Murtagh. The other two players were Glenys Whiteman and Pat Wareham.

The highlight of Steph’s playing career was her selection for the Super 8 tournament in the 2000-01 season.

“I’d been playing only about 10 years and was picked for a team of 10 bowlers selected from four regions — Manawatu, Wairarapa, Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne,” she said.

“We went and played all the other areas at a national final and we won. That was a New Zealand title.

“The following season — 2001-02 — I was selected again. The number of players in the team was cut from 10 to seven, and we won the tournament again. I’d got two New Zealand titles. The following year the sponsors pulled out and the tournament died.

“It was one of the best tournaments for men and women – the men played separately but at the same time.

“I thought, ‘I can’t do any better than that; I should spend some time doing something for someone else’.”

The spirit of helping goes back to childhood. Steph Beattie was the second eldest of eight children, four girls followed by four boys.

“We weren’t very well off,” she said.

“Mum and Dad were both out working so I was looking after my four younger brothers when they came home from school. I helped Mum out as much as I could. My youngest brother and I were born 16 years apart.

“I always enjoyed working with kids. You bring yourself down to their level and relate to them. In basketball it started with Gisborne Intermediate and the mini league that Kingi Arapeta organised. I coached Gisborne Boys’ High School teams and we got to the national finals, and I coached Campion College boys, as well.”

Her introduction to basketball had been a happy accident.

“I was dragged into it by one of the girls in my class at school,” Steph said.

“They were looking for a player and because I played basketball (known as netball from 1970) they asked me.”

The game now known as basketball was at that time called indoor basketball to differentiate it from the outdoor game.

Steph’s decision to concentrate on indoor basketball came about because the coach of the representative basketball (netball) team for whom she played gave her an ultimatum: she would have to choose between the indoor and outdoor games.

Steph chose the indoor option.

“It’s faster and more exciting,” she said.

It wasn’t long before she was in the Gisborne reps and, at 17, she was the youngest in the team.

“They looked after me.”

In 1963 she married Dave Beattie, and they had four children – Tanya, Corinne, Shane and DJ, who all played basketball . . . hardly surprising, as Steph kept playing as a young mother and took the children along.

Steph and coaching seemed to go together. Apart from the basketball coaching, she helped with learn-to-swim classes when one of the children swam competitively, and she was ushered into junior bowls coaching by Athol O’Connor, a teacher who took Ilminster students for bowls and was keen to find someone to coach another school to give his bowlers some competition.

Steph was a member of Riverside Women’s Bowling Club, on the corner of Childers Road and Disraeli Street — “across the fence from Gisborne Intermediate” — and undertook to see what she could do. She had 50 students turn up to practice on a Friday morning. She split them into two groups of 25 and went from there.

She took bowlers away to school regional championships, and Gisborne-East Coast bowlers regularly made regional finals.

After the Riverside club closed in 2013, Steph took the intermediate students to the Gisborne club, which she joined in 2014.

Steph doesn’t coach as much as she used to, but she is the centre senior women’s bowls selector and works with her squad.

When she coached men’s basketball teams, she treated all the players the same, but she has found that approach doesn’t work as well with women’s teams.

“With some women, you can really give them a blast and tell them off, and with others, you can’t,” she said.

“You have to work around it. I find it difficult sometimes but I seem to manage. You can’t treat them all the same.”

Steph became an umpire relatively early in her bowls career, in 1992.

“I was talked into it, but I thought I needed to learn the laws,” she said.

She moved into the training of others as umpires and has three candidates who will sit their exams in September-October.

At tournaments, the job entails generally keeping an eye on proceedings.

“You can be called on if the players have a query on the laws, or if a situation arises where a decision has to be made and the players can’t make it. You can be there all day and maybe make one call.”

A byproduct of the job is that she can be an unofficial talent scout.

“Sometimes players get overlooked – they might be in a team who never win anything – and I can suggest to selectors that they have a look at them.”

Now 77, Steph still plays bowls “but not a lot”.

Life membership was something she never expected.

She had done things for the sport because she loved it and wanted others to experience the enjoyment that she had.

“I didn’t do the work I have done all on my own,” she said.

“People helped me, guided me . . . you can’t get an honour like this without people behind you who have done something to get you there.”