Coast rugby riding high

Winning streak: Ngāti Porou East Coast captain Sam Parkes celebrates winning the Lochore Cup final with teammate Joe Royal. Sam Parkes won the Ian Kirkpatrick medal in the Heartland Championship last night. Last weekend, Parkes also won the King of the Ring 8 Man series, taking home $10,000. Picture by Paul Rickard

Ngāti Porou East Coast Rugby is once more riding high.

In the last 72 hours, halfback Sam Parkes — captain of Lochore Cup champions NPEC Kaupoi (Cowboys) — won the Ian Kirkpatrick Medal as the Bunnings Warehouse Heartland Championship Player of 2022, Ngarohi McGarvey-Black won the Richard Crawshaw Memorial All Blacks Sevens Player of the Year Award and New Zealand Rugby director Bailey Mackey is now, with Professor Farah Palmer, co-deputy to New Zealand Rugby's first female chair, former Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy.

This season Kim Harris assisted Coast coach and former All Black Hosea Gear — once his Gisborne Boys' High School first 15 protégé — with the Coast backs on the way to the Sky Blues' fifth national title and their first since 2012.

Harris said this of the recognition of skipper Parkes: “It is good to see Sam honoured. I'm sure he views it as an award for the entire Coast team. He's a very competitive, strong-minded and physically capable individual.

“No one can question his commitment.”

Campbell Dewes, president of NPEC Rugby, was similarly delighted for Mackey, chief executive officer of Pango Productions and Māori Sports Administrator of 2022, in his elevation at NZR Board level.

“The significance of this for us, and small Heartland unions like ours, is to see one of our former players and a former NPEC president, alongside another extremely capable Māori administrator in Dr Palmer, as deputy chair,” he said.

“Just being at the table means that Bailey can exercise his voice and vote as a decision-maker. He brings the qualities that he brought there, having been voted on.

“You couldn't have a better curriculum vitae for unique cultural and linguistic resilience. As Ngāti Porou, and as a self-made man, you are what you make of yourself. Everything you have, you've worked for.”

Dewes added that McGarvey-Black's one season, 2021, in the Sky Blue jersey, entitled the Coast to bask — if not wallow — to some small degree in his well-deserved Sevens acclaim.