The AIMS Games is a week-long sports tournament featuring 11,700 students from 373 schools around the country and overseas, including Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Islands. There are 25 codes. This is the Olympics for intermediate-aged athletes in New Zealand and the Pacific.
TBAS has 18 tauira (students) competing this year — nine in netball and nine in badminton. It has been a long and difficult journey to get here.
The Ūawa/Tolaga Bay community and surrounding Tairāwhiti region have been hit hard again and again by severe weather events in recent years.
Cyclone Gabrielle caused widespread destruction in February. Homes were destroyed, bridges and roads washed out, thousands of people were without power, phones or internet — a complete communications black-out — and communities were cut off and isolated.
The Ūawa River, which runs alongside the kura (school), was full of slash and debris.
“Whenever we hear rain in Tolaga Bay, our students have that fear of coming to school,” deputy principal (and AIMS Games netball umpire) Shanan Gray said.
The storms had created uncertainty and instability, “because we’ve faced so many devastations over that time”.
It is having a lasting impact.
Tolaga Bay teacher and AIMS Games netball coach Blanche Wanoa said the school itself luckily avoided the worst of Cyclone Gabrielle.
“But we do have girls in our team who are actually displaced at the moment, living in other houses.”
The weather and what it could mean is never far from students’ minds at school.
“Just even the slightest bit of rain, the kids are like, ‘Do we have to go home now?’ ‘Oh no, is the bus going to run tomorrow?’ And then a lot of them won’t come to school if it rains,” Wanoa said.
The school and wider community had been very supportive in helping students and whānau impacted by the storms and they all banded together to get the team to Tauranga. The drive took them almost seven hours.
“It is awesome to be here. It’s awesome for the kids to get out of Tolaga Bay and just start having some fun and meeting heaps of new people.”
As well as being coach, Wanoa is timekeeper, team van driver and cook. Like the whole community in Ūawa, she’s doing it all for the tamariki.
“They belong to me, they belong to our iwi, so who else is going to do it but everyone back home, for them?” Wanoa said.
And all that effort is worth it.
“Every time we’ve come to AIMS, we’ve had a wonderful experience. Even though we lose games, it’s about seeing the happiness on their faces and meeting new people and new friends. The whole environment is really good and it’s not about winning or losing, it’s about participation. That’s what we like about it.”
Tolaga Bay tauira Isis Sidney, 13, is at her first AIMS Games and said the opening netball match was “nerve-racking and exciting”.
It was also the first-ever AIMS Games match for Stevie Taingahue.
“It was really scary but fun at the same time,” the 11-year-old said. “I made some new friends.”
At the end of the match, both teams came together in a big group huddle, exchanging thanks and words of support and wishing each other all the best for the rest of the week.
Gray knows firsthand what the AIMS Games experience means for those taking part.
As a student at the same kura he now works at, he took part in the 2005 Games, playing basketball.
“What I love about AIMS is the vibrancy, the different colours that all the schools are wearing, and for our kids to see the diversity that there is at the AIMS Games,” he said.
All year his community has come together to tackle challenges and overcome adversity.
When a bridge was washed out and students couldn’t get to school, staff based in Tokomaru Bay started doing lessons at home so the learning could continue.
Kaiako (teachers) also made time during the school day for the AIMS Games students to practise their sport.
“We didn’t want to put more pressure on the whānau after school because all they want to do is go home and be with their whānau,” Gray said.
The team leaving for the AIMS Games on Sunday was yet another example of what the community has been able to achieve.
“We feel elated. We give opportunities to our students for them to flourish, and this is an exciting moment that they can keep for the rest of their lives.”
