Shearing dream for former Hawke’s Bay rugby hopeful Sam Henderson

Sam Henderson played for Napier Boys' High School in the national schools rugby final in 2017. Now he's a shearer with sights on a world record in Australia. Photo / NZME

A former top rugby hopeful who played for Napier Boys’ High School first XV in a national final is now planning to go right to the top in another pursuit – as a shearer in Australia.

Sam Henderson, who played when NBHS was beaten 31-28 by Auckland school St Peter’s College in the 2017 final, is one of three listed as aiming to establish a three-stand crossbred lambs record for nine hours in West Australia on November 4.

His father was part of an eight-stand merino lambs world shearing record in West Australia in 2002. Henderson spent his first six years at Boyup Brook, near where he will be making his own record bid with fellow New Zealand shearers Levi Neil, from Taumarunui, and Jimmy Samuels, of Marton.

They work for Shear Pride, a family firm run by Neil’s brother, Floyde. The brothers are already in the record books for a two-stand merino ewes effort over nine hours in April.

Henderson, who reckons parents Paul and Justine moved back to New Zealand to live in Central Hawke’s Bay in 2007 “as soon as I started singing the Australian national anthem”, pressed in the woolsheds for Waipukurau shearing contractor Neil Waihape during school holidays and had shorn 3-400 getting on to the stand every now and then.

He’d tried studies at Lincoln College for a while but says he got too much into the “uni lifestyle”, so then worked in forestry a short time before getting back to shearing, starting fulltime in November 2020 and reaching a milestone of 300 in a day before Christmas.

Having decided he was too small to make it big in rugby, he headed back to the old “stomping ground” of Boyup Brook in August 2021 and was soon knocking up the tallies on the merinos of the west.

The November bid will be the first in the 9-hour, 3-stand crossbred lambs category and the second of the season in Australia, after Australian Ethan Harder’s 624 solo 8-hour merino lambs record this week, during which there were close Hawke’s Bay connections with right-hand man Elton Hokianga coming from Hastings.

Shearers in or from Hawke’s Bay have had a high profile in world record shearing, with more than 10 having featured in solo and multi-stand categories over the past two decades.