Hi All,

I have had an eventful first 6 weeks in the role. Thank you for welcoming me into the organisation. We had a damaging cyclone a week after my arrival. That shut the organisation down for a week, damaged the garage doors at the gym and having some water damage inside, but the physical damage is nothing compared to the emotional stress events like this have on people. How are our people?

My name is Marty Veale, the new head coach of the Taniwha at Northland Rugby. My vision for Northland Rugby is to fill Semenoff Stadium again.

How - play an exciting brand of rugby that engages our community and makes you not want to miss one of our 5 home games this season. Every decision that we are making starts with, “will this help fill the stadium?”

Currently we have 50 athletes both women and men, they are committed to 4 days a week in the Northland Rugby training centre on Riverside Drive. These sessions involve skills, tactical, technical as well as increasing our physical capacity to play the game at a high tempo for longer.

As we are seeing with Super Rugby and the new time laws, this has increased the ball in play time from 32 min averages in 2022 up to 44 min in some games already this year.

Great for our fans, not so much for our athletes trying to get to peek physical condition. They then have two days a week at their clubs, with club games starting on the 25th March they are some busy women and men.

Through many collaborative meetings we have combined our 3 programs through this part of the year. Women’s HP, Academy and Men’s HP are now training together, we are all working hard to get to know each other and make significant shifts in our performance .

The staff have been getting through all of our athletes and drilling down on their work ons, this has been a great process as we have gotten to know our people so much better. They all have amazing stories of how they got here and we want to continue to develop them all to reach their hopes and dreams.

Our doors are always open and we would love to see you for a coffee and a chat or watch a training session.

Our athletes are in from 4-8pm on Monday and 4-6pm Tuesday and Thursday’s. Please feel free to come down to 136 Riverside Drive and get to know your Northland Rugby hero’s better.

Kind regards

Marty

Article added: Friday 17 March 2023