Rope in the Fiji and Kenya sevens teams and you start getting a sharper picture of what Gordon is all about.
She built a rapport with the players when she ran a cafe and bar below a Willis St apartment block in the capital city.
"The boys used to come down for breakfast."
However, she started helping them out with some contemporary survival skills in the concrete jungle.
"I taught some of them how to make coffee. I also taught them how to iron their shirts," says the woman who was born in Ba, Fiji, before she enrolled at Waikato University to complete her teaching degree.
"Hika says he misses my cooking," says Gordon, revealing her Fiji meals, such as lolo (baked fish in coconut cream) is popular.
Quite often the players helped her prepare meals, too.
"We all often sat down and ate together at the cafe ... where they enjoyed home cooking," she says, adding it's still not unusual for the boys to visit her before and after games in Wellington.
Gordon says she met many of the players' parents and family members for a good part of a decade. The players treat her two daughters like their sisters.
"Some of them often look up to me as a mentor," she says, at times finding herself lending a sympathetic ear to their after-match post mortems.
"They often talk about their games. If they were sitting on the bench I would often talk to them about what they could do to get back on the park.
"I often kept them in focus and analysing them with goals to move forward," says Gordon who claims former All Black coaches Sir Graham Henry and Wayne Smith know her as well.
The Bay boys have left an indelible impression on her.
"They are very family-orientated young men. They have a strong sense of whanau in them and they are very respectful."
She has found them to be "very motivated".
"Little things can get them down quite quickly because they take things to heart but they tend to come out of it eventually.
"They are very hard on themselves and want to do better all the time," she believes.
Akin to parents who find it difficult to favour any one child in a family, she finds it "very hard to support the Canes".
"Hika plays for Chiefs so I have to be very careful."
She tends to support whoever graces the Cake Tin during a Super Rugby match.
"Zac was a Crusader and I remember going to see him one day when he was playing for them in Wellington.
"I don't like to disappoint them but the Chiefs is my team although the boys have tried to change me into their team colours," she says with a laugh.
After a decade of running her business, Gordon sold up and returned to the classroom.
"I sometimes used the boys as mentors in my class because it was amazing for the students to look up to them," she says.
Gordon featured in the New Zealand Herald and NZ Woman's Weekly in 1997 as someone who had ventured into a "man's league".
She became the first Fiji-Indian in New Zealand to coach rugby league and one of "very few women".
Despite receiving queries from some of the Manurewa Intermediate School parents in 1995 about whether the school note to inform them she was coach had erred in the honorifics of "Ms", Gordon went on to command the respect of the school community while at the helm of the senior boys' rugby league outfit.
In 1997 the team clinched the Auckland Intermediate Schools' Regional Champion-of-Champions Tournament.
She found inspiration to coach after watching the then Auckland Warriors' inaugural NRL match in 1994.
For now, the part-time relieving teacher is lapping up the northern summer in Frisco and hopes to whet her appetite for the different genre of music, from classical to jazz, on offer in the Californian city.
