Sport Hawke's Bay coach development officer Tim Motu is keen to hear from anyone who wants to volunteer. Photo / Doug Laing.
The Napier son of an All Blacks rugby legend says there’s a “quiet crisis” in the region’s sports volunteering, and kids are paying the price.
The new winter sports season is starting for thousands of children in Hawke’s Bay, but how much longer that Kiwi way of life can survive is being questioned by former Napier MP and newly conferred Hawke’s Bay Rugby Union president Chris Tremain, who has written an opinion article for Hawke’s Bay Today, claiming there’s a “quiet crisis for our community”.
“Hawke’s Bay families, it’s time to step up,” he writes.
The “sad news”, he says, is that the average New Zealand adult spends 90 minutes a day on social media. He urges them to get off it and volunteer.
Others, such as Hawke’s Bay Hockey’s Emily Gaddum, who mixes a fulltime role in her sport with coaching her daughter’s team, say parents have been left “time-poor”.
Retired former Napier Boys’ High School principal Ross Brown, now living in Whanganui, recalls the days when parents and teachers as coaches were in abundance.
In the post-war years, when parents had Saturday mornings free because there was no Saturday shopping, volunteering for sports and school activities was the thing.
Gradual change came after such legislation as the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Act 1990, and the Employment Contracts Act 1991, both of which changed the hours in which New Zealanders worked, and when they could and couldn’t be available to coach youth teams.
“New Zealand is not what it was,” says Brown, accepting that no one is going to turn back the clock. But he worries about the future of children’s sport.
“I remember when the suggestion was that rugby should be taken out of schools to the clubs. Teachers were volunteers, coaching in the afternoons, with the team on Saturday. I said that was where 17 teachers would be lost as coaches, if it were moved to clubs.”
The problem seems to be more profound in rugby, where moves have been made in recent years to play more during the week, to alleviate some of the clashing of codes.
Hawke’s Bay Rugby community rugby manager Sean Davies says the issue is complicated, but that concentrating children’s sport in schools might be one pathway.
He grew up in South Africa, and says, “There might not be a lot of things Africa does right, but one it does do well is that all the children’s sports is in schools. Everyone has to do sport at school, and sometimes school will go to five o’clock or 5.30 because of sport in the afternoon. The clubs are for senior sport.”
Hockey’s Gaddum and Hawke’s Bay Netball general manager Aaron Good don’t accept the situation has reached “crisis” point in their codes, but they concede that some teams are struggling to find coaches. In Gaddum’s words, it’s often the “same ones” putting their hands up.
One charged with finding solutions is Sport Hawke’s Bay coach development officer Tim Motu, who has seen the volunteer coaching shortage over all 20 years in the job.
“There’s never been enough volunteers,” he says, noting that many of the staff around him also volunteer as coaches, as he does, outside of the day-job.
“Community sport runs on goodwill. The challenges have always been there, and the challenges remain. Volunteers are to be valued.”
Among the challenges is equipping coaches with the skills to give children a “good experience” in their sports.
“Volunteers are good people who are willing to give of themselves for the benefit of others.
“It is such a changeable thing that a solution today might not be the solution tomorrow.”
Brown, who can’t recall a specific “single factor” that impacted teacher availability for coaching, sees a need for intervention, possibly at the political level, where one step might be to incentivise employers to enable staff to be available to coach teams.
In the meantime, Tremain urges anyone prepared to volunteer to contact Sport Hawke’s Bay.
“Our kids are waiting for someone to believe in them. Be that someone.”
Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter, based in Napier, with more than 50 years’ experience in the news industry, and more than three decades of trying to help sports teams, clubs and children stay in the game.