Anahera-Pono Whakatope, deputy principal of Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ngāti Kahungunu o Te Wairoa, is heading the committee staging the Ross Shield Hawke's Bay Primary Schools rugby tournament in September. Photo / Doug Laing
Anahera-Pono Whakatope, deputy principal of Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ngāti Kahungunu o Te Wairoa, is heading the committee staging the Ross Shield Hawke's Bay Primary Schools rugby tournament in September. Photo / Doug Laing
Wairoa schoolteacher Anahera-Pono Whakatope has never played rugby and surprises even herself now heading the committee running possibly the biggest rugby event in the town in six years.
Thus, the deputy principal at Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ngāti Kahungunu o Te Wairoa is not afraid to ask for helpahead of the Ross Shield Hawke’s Bay Primary Schools Rugby Tournament. It’s Wairoa’s turn to stage the five-round championship on September 22-27.
Imagine the intricacies of staging a tournament with 132 players, plus officials and whanau at local rugby HQ Lambton Square for a week of rugby.
A reunion of the team, one of nine Wairoa sides listed as winners on the Honours Board dating back over 120 years, is planned. It will be a particularly poignant gathering of the players, now aged over 70, having apparently never had a team photo with the trophy.
Much of the memorabilia held by the Blake whanau, which has been represented on the fields multi-generationally, was lost in a homestead fire, including Bill Blake’s own Wairoa cap from 1944 and the caps of sevens sons who wore the green jersey between 1975 and 1985.
Whakatope, whose own sports prowess was in netball and basketball, said during lunch-break at her kura kast week: “If there’s anything that Wairoa needs it is that we all band together. Since Wairoa last hosted this tournament in 2019, we’ve all been through quite a bit.
“I put my hand up,” she said. “I’m new to the Ross Shield, new to rugby.”
Things started late, in May, and there were just “eight weeks to go” in a town where the performance of the organisers and this year’s team run parallel in importance.
First, she had to start finding out “what it was all about” and was surprised, in a good way, to learn what the Ross Shield tournament means to the families, including her own, and the district.
The Blake whanau at the 2023 Ross Shield tournament in Napier in 2023, for the recapping of the primary schools rugby patron and his seven sons whose Wairoa Ross Shield team caps were lost in a fire. Photo / NZME
She made a beeline for such rugby stalwarts as Sid Ropitini, Toby Taylor and Wayne Hema, and organisers of last year’s tournament. That was held in Waipukurau and won for a third year in a row by Napier, in a continuation of the Napier-Hastings domination since Wairoa shared the title with Hastings East 31 years ago.
Amid the horrors that the weather has thrown at Wairoa since the last Ross Shield tournament there, fingers are crossed that Lambton Square will be in good nick for three games a day.
Senior Wairoa sub-union defences for the Barry Cup are being played at other venues, such as the first on July 20 at Māhia, to help keep the square’s turf fresh for what will be the biggest event of any sort in Wairoa this year.
Players and officials will be accommodated at the only two motels in town and at marae as far away as Māhia, more than 40km from Wairoa.
At least six Hawke’s Bay referees, mainly from Napier-Hastings, will officiate as referees or associate referees, with three needed per game.
They’re expected to include appointments officer Mark Johnson and fellow career school teacher, principal, and Premier grade referee Martin Hantz.
A particular feature will be the end-of-tournament handing over of the tournament’s first mauri stone to organisers of the 2026 tournament to be held in Hastings.
It’s being provided by Ngāti Pāhauwera as a symbol of protection and strength for the tournament, one of the last under-13 weight-restricted rugby tournaments in New Zealand.
The tournament has outlasted such others as the upper North Island’s inter-provincial Roller Mills tournament, canned in 2019 as the Northern Region Rugby Council stopped enabling provincial competition for teams under the age of 16.
Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 52 years of journalism experience, 42 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.
