Ngaire Lee started playing basketball when she was 18 and has been heavily involved ever since. Photo / Stephen Parker
Ngaire Lee started playing basketball when she was 18 and has been heavily involved ever since. Photo / Stephen Parker
The sporting world needs more people like Ngaire Lee.
Her name is synonymous with Rotorua Basketball. She started playing when she was 18 and has been heavily involved ever since, in a multitude of ways.
For seven decades, Lee has played, coached and administrated the game she loves but at88 years old she says this year will be her last.
This week she is as busy as ever, sorting out draws and processing the results during the New Zealand Secondary Schools Basketball Junior Zone 2 Tournament.
Even while being interviewed for this article, she was handling queries from coaches, referees and players about the draw. You get the feeling she could do it with her eyes closed. Lee said, while she has loved every moment, it was time for someone younger to step in.
Basketball was very new to Rotorua when Lee started playing 70 years ago.
"We had a netball team and we thought 'why don't we give this new sport basketball a go'. It was played in the Kahukura Hall back then - we wore uniforms with long sleeves and there were no sidelines or end lines. The sidelines were the benches everyone sat on and the end lines were the wooden walls.
"I enjoyed the companionship. A lot of fun, a lot of friends, I knew everybody that played."
Ngaire Lee and Alan Lord ahead of the Rotorua Basketball Association Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Photo / File
Being able to watch others experience that enjoyment is what has driven her for so many years. As well as being on the Rotorua Basketball committee for many years, she was the Rotorua Girls' High School sports co-ordinator, a job in which she loved being able to coach up and coming players.
"I got on the committee after I'd been playing a few years. The late Wally Glew was secretary and I was treasurer and we worked together for years until he went to work for Basketball New Zealand. I just sort of kept going.
"The kids keep me going, the teenagers. I didn't retire from the school until I was 83 and I've said to them that this will have to be my last year of basketball. They need someone younger, I'll be 89 in January and they don't need an 89-year-old down here.
"We had some good results with Rotorua Girls'. We were runners-up at nationals one year and third another, it goes up and down."
Lee is a life member of Rotorua Basketball and Basketball New Zealand. Rotorua Basketball president Darrell Pene said Lee was "irreplaceable".
"Ngaire was at the foundation of basketball in Rotorua and her service has been unbroken all the way through. There's no way you can repay someone's service like that, she's an icon of her sport not just in Rotorua but in the whole of the Bay.
"There's no one like Ngaire. People just get used to seeing Rotorua Basketball and Ngaire, they're synonymous with each other now," he said.
There's no way you can repay someone's service like that, she's an icon of her sport not just in Rotorua but in the whole of the Bay.
Lee does not plan to completely do away with sport. She has recently taken up indoor bowls and said she would probably add an extra night of that to her schedule.
"Sport has always been a big part of my life and family's. My eldest son is involved in rugby, my second son is a swim coach in Tauranga and my daughter is overseas - she's a PE teacher and has just qualified for the World Half-Ironman Championships.
"Sport is great for enjoyment and in team sports they have to learn to get on with other people. If there's disharmony in the team they won't play well."
If the past 70 years are anything to go by one thing is for sure; whatever Lee decides to do next, she will give no less than 100 per cent.
