Zealand Rugby Research Articles

Beyond the All Blacks Representations: The Dialectic between the Indigenization of Rugby and Postcolonial Strategies to Control Māori

Since the advent of professional rugby, Māori have gained international visibility and attractiveness. The representation of the New Zealand rugby team revolves around their integration and the incorporation of their warrior tradition, suggesting a strong connection between rugby and contemporary Māori society. Rugby has indeed been the object of a process of indigenization, fulfilling goals of sociocultural continuity, political acknowledgment, and, in the professional era, upward social mobility. Nevertheless, rugby has also partly fulfilled its role as a tool of colonization in creating and sanctioning power differentials. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in New Zealand, this article examines the relationship between Māori and rugby as a dialectic phenomenon that has resulted in the diversification of Māori experiences and perceptions of rugby and attests to the heterogeneity of Māori life experiences, aspirations, and formulations of indigeneity in contemporary society.

Schooling Elite New Zealand Rugby Players for a Life after Sport: Using Higher Education for Career Transition

Schooling Elite New Zealand Rugby Players for a Life after Sport: Using Higher Education for Career Transition

Differences and Changes in the Physical Characteristics of Professional and Amateur Rugby Union Players

Numerous studies have highlighted differences between playing levels and positions in rugby union; however, few studies have investigated longitudinal progressions of body composition and physical performance. Between-player differences and within-player changes in body composition, strength, power, speed, and repeated sprint ability, from 1,161 New Zealand rugby union players from 2004 to 2007, were estimated using a mixed modeling procedure. Props had the highest mass, percent body fat, strength, and slowest speed times compared with the other positions, whereas outside backs had the fastest speed time and lowest percent body fat. For most measures, there were small-to-moderate differences (range, 1.1-14%) between players selected and not selected for provincial teams and small-to-large differences (range, 1.8-15%) between provincial and Super Rugby (professional) players. The faster 20-m sprint times in international compared with Super Rugby players was small in magnitude for both the forwards (1.9%) and backs (2.2%). The average annual improvements were small to moderate for strength (range, 2.1-15%) and small for repeated sprint ability within the lower playing levels (~1.5%). Small increases occurred in lower body strength (~7.0%) as players moved from Super Rugby to provincial competition. Small decreases in sprint time (~1.6%) and small increases in strength (~6.3%) occurred as players moved from Super Rugby to midyear international competition. The differences between levels in performance provide level-specific characteristics from Super Rugby and below, but international players may be selected because of greater skill and experience. Changes in physical performance between competitions may be a result of reduced training loads because of regular high-intensity matches and greater travel involved in the Super Rugby competition.

‘It is where blokes can be blokes’: making places in a New Zealand rugby club

Using the case study of a New Zealand rugby club, in this article, we highlight the role of gender and performance in place attachment. We discuss various performances that contribute to achieving a sense of attachment of club members to the (imagined) community of the rugby club and the different physical spaces of its home ground. Even though performances are played out and read against the backdrop of a popular discourse of New Zealand rugby masculinity, we did not observe characteristics of stereotypical ‘rugby masculinity’ in all rugby places, nor were performances the same throughout one day. Instead, variations were found depending on whether performance was ‘front stage’ or ‘backstage’.

Interaction without walls: Analysing leadership discourse through dramaturgy and participation

Goffman's dramaturgical model of interaction is often used to examine how communicative events are framed differently in public and private settings. However, this idea has restrictively been conflated with specific spatial locations. This paper contends that it is not the place where discourse is performed that styles it as front or backstage, but rather the stances taken in interactions, and the participation framework involved. Furthermore, backstage can be used to negotiate stances later performed frontstage, where they may index wider, ideological aspects of identity. This is demonstrated through the analysis of a sequence of linked backstage and frontstage interactions that involve two rugby coaches. The extracts presented and analysed take place in a New Zealand rugby team, a type of organisation in which space is particularly fluid. The dramaturgical model is demonstrated to be of use in examining leadership discourse within organisations, particularly in organisations in which multiple leaders exist.

FACE VALUES: SEAN FITZPATRICK

Sean Fitzpatrick is a legend of international rugby and international sport. He was captain of the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks. He played 92 international matches for the All Blacks from 1986 to 1998, including a world record 63 consecutive Test matches and 51 Test matches as captain of New Zealand. He captained the All Blacks in the classic 1995 World Cup Final against South Africa. Fitzpatrick remains closely involved in rugby — as an author, journalist and pundit. He is on the main board of Harlequins RFC and is the co-founder and director of Front Row Hospitality, which includes the sport-to-business leadership company Front Row Leadership — offering consultation, leadership and motivational advice to companies. Des Dearlove talked to him about leadership and life after the All Blacks.

Postcolonial Anxieties and the Browning of New Zealand Rugby

This article examines postcolonial race politics and the re-centering of embodied whiteness and mediated white bodies as constituted through "white flight" and the so-called browning of rugby in New Zealand. Previous studies have problematized the ways in which rugby union is often framed within the national imaginary as a culturally unifying space—commonly depicted as transcendent of New Zealand's postcolonial racial tensions. Here we extend these critiques by pointing to several themes that have recently emerged within popular sports media, namely, those that position male Māori and Pacific Islander bodies as a threat to the well-being of the national game and the national identities it authorizes, and those that locate the Pākehā (white) male sporting body as under duress, or made vulnerable, by the brown-bodied, interloping "Other." The article concludes with a discussion of how these popular representations of racialized rugby-playing bodies, in the age of global mobility and national multiculturalism, articulate to and within foundational (white) national myths of white-settler meritocracy, rurality, and coloniality.

Dispositions of elite-level Australian rugby coaches towards game sense: characteristics of their coaching habitus

Bourdieu's analytic concept of habitus has provided a valuable means of theorising coach development but is yet to be operationalised in empirical research. This article redresses this oversight by drawing on a larger study that inquired into how the ‘coaching habitus’ of elite-level Australian and New Zealand rugby coaches structured their interpretation and use of the Game Sense approach to coaching to illustrate how habitus can be operationalised. It focuses on the identification of characteristics of the individual coaching habitus of four elite-level Australian rugby coaches and how they shape their interpretation and use of Game Sense. Drawing on suggestions made by Lau, we identify the characteristics of four individual ‘coaching habitus’ by examining their views on: (1) the characteristics of good coaches; (2) characteristics of great rugby players and how to develop them; and (3) their dispositions towards innovation in coaching.

A Tale of Two Dinners: New Zealand Rugby and the Embrace of Empire, 1919–32

This article challenges the standard portrayal of rugby as a vibrant component of New Zealand's emerging national identity during the first third of the twentieth century. Deriving from a critique of the 1905 All Blacks tour of Britain, it argues that New Zealand rugby methods and attitudes attracted more condemnation than adulation from Britain and that the Antipodean game was itself sharply divided between reformers determined to modernise the game and allow greater leniency on questions of expenses and professionalism and conservatives loyal to the International Rugby Board. By 1932 the New Zealand Rugby Football Union had been thwarted by its British masters in every campaign for reform – an outcome that reveals parallels with a broader historiographical interpretation of retreat from some earlier notions of independence and claims of superiority to an acceptance of New Zealand's junior role as a dominion within the British imperial partnership.

Rugby, Pacific Peoples, and the Cultural Politics of National Identity in New Zealand

In the wake of his retirement from international rugby in 2006, Tana Umaga was feted as having ‘helped to change the face of New Zealand rugby and even New Zealand society’. Regardless of the veracity of such statements, as a one-time All Black captain Umaga is undoubtedly a persuasive political symbol in a country where rugby has near-religious import. He embodies New Zealand's journey from erstwhile British colony to pluralistic Pacific nation, and offers proof positive that equal opportunity is alive and at work. The question is, however, to what extent can Umaga really be taken as a bellwether of shifting racial and cultural politics in New Zealand? Certainly, while Pacific peoples have traditionally been regarded as misbegotten Kiwis, Umaga shows that they are ‘now part of mainstream New Zealand’. But, as a cultural construct, Umaga's identity is an unstable one. While he may have challenged the standard (mis)conceptions of race, ethnicity and national belonging in New Zealand, it would be erroneous to believe that he has escaped the labels and stereotypes endemic to popular racial discourse. Through Umaga I ask in this paper questions of exclusion and belonging, particularly as they relate to Pacific peoples in New Zealand. I argue that though rugby may offer a context where New Zealanders can engage on mutual terms, it gives lie to the fact that the acceptance of Pacific peoples as fully-fledged Kiwis is far from unanimous.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Sport and Ethnicity in New Zealand

Author's IntroductionThis article discusses why scholars are reconsidering the notion that Rugby Union was a central factor in generating a distinct identity for New Zealanders of British ancestry (Pakeha). The belief that Rugby acted as an agent of integration between Maori and Pakeha has also been questioned. Sporting clubs and events administered by New Zealand's ethnic minorities do, however, provide a means by which these groups can engage with the wider community while maintaining their own identity.Author Recommends:Chris Collins and Steve Jackson (eds.), Sport in Aotearoa/New Zealand Society (Albany, NY: Thomson, 2007).A useful overview of sport in New Zealand, particularly the chapters ‘Maori Sport: Pre‐Colonisation to Today’ by Brendan Hokowhitu and ‘Treaty Principles and Maori Sport: Contemporary Issues’ by Farah Palmer.Farah Palmer, ‘State of Maori Sport’, in M. Mulholland (ed.), State of the Maori Nation: Twenty‐First Century Issues in Aotearoa (Auckland: Reed, 2006), 261–75.An excellent overview of Maori participation in sport, commencing with a historical overview and proceeding to data drawn from the 2005 survey by Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC). Includes useful comparative tables on Maori and non‐Maori participation on sport at the grassroots and elite levels.Greg Ryan (ed.), Tackling Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand Society 1854–2004 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2005).Contains eleven chapters exploring the connections between Rugby and New Zealand society. Two chapters, Greg Ryan's ‘Rural Myth and Urban Actuality: the Anatomy of All Black and New Zealand Rugby 1884–1938’ and Caroline Daley's ‘The Invention of 1905’ reassess the extent to which Rugby Union generated Pakeha identity. Maori participation in rugby and its role in race relations are explored in two chapters by Greg Ryan: ‘The Paradox of Maori Rugby 1870–1914’ and ‘Anthropological Football: Maori and the 1937 Springbok Tour of New Zealand’.S. Thompson, P. Rewi and D. Wrathall, ‘Maori Experience in Sport and Physical Activity: Research and Initiatives’, in C. Collins (ed.), Sport in New Zealand Society (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 2000), 241–55.Explores the experiences of Maori women in sport. The sections discussing the cross‐cultural issues between Pakeha coaches and Maori players and spectators are particularly useful.Online Materials: http://www.sparc.org.nz/ The Web site of Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) has extensive material on participation in sport and government policies on sport. It contains considerable material on Maori participation in sport, including reports from Te Roopu Manaaki, an independent body who advise (SPARC) on Maori participation in sport. http://www.nzchinese.org.nz/ Information on the Easter Sport tournament organised by the New Zealand Chinese Association can be found on this Web site. http://www.wisc.org.nz/ Web site of Wellington Indian Sports Club, the earliest Indian sports club established in New Zealand. Web site includes details of history and current news. Other Indian Sports Club Web sites with historical content include Auckland Indian Sports Club, http://www.aisc.org.nz/; Christchurch Indian Sports Club, http://www.cisc.org.nz/; and Pukekohe Indian Sports Club, http://www.pisc.co.nz/.Focus Questions What are some of the difficulties in defining ‘ethnicity’ in relation to sport in New Zealand? Why has the sport of Rugby Union been so closely associated with issues of ethnicity in New Zealand? Why are scholarly views on this changing? What factors have helped and what factors have hindered participation in sport for New Zealand's Maori, Pacific Island and Asian communities?

Producing Allblacks.com: Cultural Intermediaries and the Policing of Electronic Spaces of Sporting Consumption

Despite the rapid growth in new media technologies and interest from both sport organizations and corporations in interacting with premium consumers, very little research examines the cultural production and regulation of electronic sporting spaces of consumption. Drawing from interviews with the New Zealand Rugby Union’s (NZRU) cultural intermediaries, this article presents an investigation of the production of allblacks.com, the virtual home of the New Zealand All Blacks and the official website of the game’s governing body. Specifically, we employ a cultural-economic theoretical framework to illuminate the institutionalized codes of production and work routines of the rugby union’s cultural intermediaries who police and regulate what appears on the website to unashamedly promote an elective affinity that includes corporate sponsors, media organizations, players, and the NZRU.

Burnout in elite rugby: Relationships with basic psychological needs fulfilment

In this study, we examined the utility of self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2002) as a framework for understanding the antecedents of athlete burnout in elite New Zealand rugby union players (n=133). Perceptions of competence, autonomy, and relatedness (i.e. basic psychological needs) were hypothesized to be negatively related to burnout scores, while players classified as “high-burnouts” were predicted to report lower needs fulfilment than players with low burnout. Canonical correlation analysis indicated that relatedness was a low to moderate predictor of burnout, but players' competence and autonomy accounted for substantial portions of variance in two athlete burnout symptoms: reduced accomplishment and sport devaluation. The proportion of variance accounted for in the exhaustion dimension of athlete burnout was not substantive. Multivariate analysis of variance supported these results, as “high-burnout” players had lower competence and autonomy scores than athletes reporting low burnout symptoms. The two groups did not report significantly different relatedness scores. Implications of these results for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

Blurring the boundaries of sports public relations: National stereotypes as sport announcers’ public relations tools

Live media coverage is a key element of the relationship between a sport and its publics. The role of television producers, including announcers, is to connect effectively with the public, creating an entertaining and engaging package that keeps viewers watching. In considering this as an aspect of public relations, this paper explores how national stereotypes function to present a consistent and easily interpretable set of messages that capture publics by reinforcing their existing understandings and by providing resources for enhancing the drama and uncertainty that is such a desirable aspect of the sport audience experience. Mapping the elements of the stereotype of Frenchness in rugby union as a case study, our analysis is based on interviews with well-known French and New Zealand rugby union announcers and analyses of a decade of broadcasts of France versus New Zealand tests. We conclude that the use of stereotypes, based on the creation of differences between national teams, can be conceived of as an effective form of public relations which heightens interest and reinforces patriotic subject positions for viewers and therefore mobilises a national public.

Evaluation of RugbySmart: A rugby union community injury prevention programme

RugbySmart, a rugby union injury prevention programme, was launched in New Zealand in 2001. It was compulsory for all coaches and referees to complete RugbySmart requirements annually in order to continue coaching or refereeing. After 5 years of implementation the programme partners, Accident Compensation Corporation and New Zealand Rugby Union, evaluated RugbySmart to determine its effectiveness in reducing injuries. The purpose was to evaluate the effect of RugbySmart on reducing injury rates per 100,000 players and resulting injury prevention behaviours. The RugbySmart programme was associated with a decrease in injury claims per 100,000 players in most areas the programme targeted; the programme had negligible impact on non-targeted injury sites. The decrease in injury claims numbers was supported by results from the player behaviour surveys pre- and post-RugbySmart. There was an increase in safe behaviour in the contact situations of tackle, scrum and ruck technique.

The Media Sports Cultural Complex

This article explores the interdependence of interest groups operating within the media sports cultural complex in relation to the national sport of rugby union in New Zealand/Aotearoa. Specifically, we scrutinize the corporate “partnerships” between the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU), Adidas, and News Corporation in relation to issues and debates surrounding the globalization of New Zealand's iconic rugby team, the All Blacks. The article draws on extensive interviews with the NZRU's marketing and sponsorship manager and Adidas New Zealand's marketing manager. These interviews provide rare insights into how the strategies of these organizations, and their interrelated (but not interchangeable) commercial objectives, set limits and exert powerful pressures on aspects of the production and consumption of the national sporting mythology in New Zealand.

Effect of nationwide injury prevention programme on serious spinal injuries in New Zealand rugby union: ecological study

Effect of nationwide injury prevention programme on serious spinal injuries in New Zealand rugby union: ecological study

Effect of nationwide injury prevention programme on serious spinal injuries in New Zealand rugby union: ecological study

Objective To investigate the effect of RugbySmart, a nationwide educational injury prevention programme, on the frequency of spinal cord injuries.Design Ecological study.Setting New Zealand rugby union. Participants Population at risk...

Sports Advertising, Cultural Production and Corporate Nationalism at the Global-Local Nexus: Branding the New Zealand All Blacks

This essay provides an in-depth examination of a contextually-specific case study of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi's production of a recent television commercial for adidas's sponsorship of New Zealand's iconic rugby team, the All Blacks. Through interviews with representatives from adidas, the New Zealand Rugby Union, and Saatchi & Saatchi, and analyses of industry documents, the commercial is located within a range of interrelated cultural, economic, technological and institutional conditions of production. The analysis reveals the complexity of the processes and practices through which the commercial was encoded with dominant cultural meanings and representations employed to communicate a complex televisual discourse of corporate nationalism and spectacle at the global-local nexus.

Athlete Burnout: A Longitudinal Qualitative Study

Athlete burnout has been a concern to sport organizations, the media, and researchers because of its association with negative welfare and performance outcomes (Gould, Udry, Tuffey, & Loehr, 1996; Smith, 1986). Conclusions drawn in existing cross-sectional studies (e.g., Cresswell & Eklund, 2006c; Gould, Tuffey, Udry, & Loehr, 1996) are limited because they are not based on data sensitive to the dynamic nature of athlete burnout. In the current study, professional New Zealand rugby players (n = 9) and members of team management (n = 3) were interviewed multiple times over a 12-month period in an effort to capture accounts reflecting the dynamic nature of their experiences. In these interviews, some players reported experiences consistent with multidimensional descriptions of burnout in the extant literature. During the course of the interviews players reported positive and negative changes within their experiences. Players’ experiences and adaptations were interpreted using existing theoretical explanations.