Reinga Bloxham is a dab hand at flipping hundreds of whitebait fritters in her parent’s yard, never afraid to muck in.
She has the performance guru of the San Diego Padres baseball team on speed dial, always keen to get advice from outside the box.
She’s kept precious notes in her phone from her “creative, mad” aunt, the late Georgie Salter, on how to beat netball’s world champions.
And she’s the only coach who’s been in charge for every match her team has played across seven seasons of the ANZ Premiership. She’s a survivor, she laughs.
Now Bloxham is ready to put all her eclectic experience, knowledge and hard work to use in taking the next step in her netball career – which she hopes will be a seat on the Silver Ferns coaching bench.
As she prepares for her eighth season coaching the Southern Steel, starting this weekend, Bloxham admits she has a “hunger in my belly” to coach an international netball side.
That realisation came after she helped the Welsh Feathers to ninth at last year’s World Cup; the specialist coach appointment effectively a tap on the shoulder from Netball New Zealand for Bloxham to gain experience at the top echelon of the sport.
And if the next opportunity came up to work alongside reappointed Silver Ferns head coach Dame Noeline Taurua as her assistant, Bloxham would “wholeheartedly throw my hand up to have a crack at it”.
Bloxham has proved she has the tenacity and patience to wait for her time at the top to come.
A feisty midcourter from the tiny Southland town of Wyndham, Bloxham was a foundation member of the dominant Southern Sting 25 years ago.
Coaxed into coaching by southern legend Robyn Broughton, she began her career in earnest helping coach Southland to victory in the 2009 Lois Muir Challenge.
Since then, she’s been mentored by other netball greats – including Salter and Taurua. And a little more surprisingly, she often asks for the advice of multiple world softball champion Don Tricker, who helped the All Blacks to victory at two World Cups and now works in the US as the director of player health and performance with baseball’s Padres.
There have been huge highs in Bloxham’s coaching career – the Steel’s back-to-back victories at the start of the premiership and stepping in to help coach the Silver Ferns in the 2022 Cadbury Series when Taurua had Covid. And then there are the heavy lows when her side went through all of the past premiership season without a win.
“Every week last season kind of felt like survival,” says the woman endearingly known as Curly.
“Afterwards, I looked at it and thought ‘Am I the right person for the job? Have I got the right skillset?’ But I have such a competitive nature that I need to have another go at this because I want to do a better job.”
The coaching secrets she keeps
Bloxham was the youngest of seven siblings growing up in Wyndham, 45km east of Invercargill. It’s greatest claim to fame was hosting the street races in the Burt Munro Challenge – the biggest gathering of motorcycle enthusiasts in the Southern Hemisphere.
Every year, she helped her parents put picnic tables in the front yard and sell fresh whitebait patties to “the bikie dudes in leathers.”
“It would be a massive day cooking from 8am to 6pm,” Bloxham says. “Mum and Dad have been whitebaiting for 42 years now. I’m a terrible cook but I can cook whitebait patties.
“Wyndham was a cool place to grow up, and Mum got us into all sorts of sports. She never played netball, but she was an administrator, and she’d take us on a Māori netball trip every year, filling the car with all our cousins and friends. That’s how I got into netball. (Bloxham is Ngāti Kahungunu).
“There are people in Wyndham today who’ve supported me throughout my whole playing and coaching careers, who I see at the Four Square and they’re really proud of where I’ve got to.”
As a kid, Bloxham spent a lot of time with Aunty Georgie, a former Silver Fern who starred at the 1975 World Cup and then coached the Otago Rebels to victory in the first National Bank Cup final.
“As a teenager, I remember her flying through the front gate with her car full of netball gear and saying ‘Get in, I’m delivering a workshop in Invercargill and you’re coming to help me’. I so looked forward to those trips, getting to spend time in the car with her – though she drove like a bat out of hell,” she laughs.
Somewhere deep in Bloxham’s phone are notes from her last conversation with Salter, who died in 2018.
“She said, ‘Right, I need to tell you how we’re going to beat Australia’,” Bloxham recalls. “And she started plotting these attacking movements that Gina [Crampton] would be able to do. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘now I need you to tell your friend’.”
The ‘friend’ was Taurua. Bloxham, who had been assistant coach to Taurua at the Steel in 2016, dutifully passed the information on. “Even in her sickest days, she was always thinking of new ways to beat the opposition,” Bloxham laughs.
The notes are an example of how Bloxham has been building knowledge – “stealing” tips, she says, from the very best – towards her goal of one day coaching the Silver Ferns.
She also appreciates the time she spent playing under Broughton, who passed away last year.
“There are still plenty of times I think ‘what would she do in this situation’?” Bloxham says. “The other day at training, I saw Abby Erwood go for an intercept and when she tipped it and I yelled out, ‘If you can tip it, you can catch it’, which Robyn would always say.
“She was so structured and stern and you never second-guessed her, but we just followed her. I don’t ever remember her talking about winning, but it was an expectation. You knew what your job was.”
Broughton first got Bloxham to coach her Verdon College A team when she was in Wellington working with the Pulse. “She also created a job when I left school, where I was a coaching development officer for Southland,” she says. “Then she told me I was applying for teachers’ college. I did what she said because she could see where I was heading. I’m so thankful she saw that vision for me.” Bloxham taught up until seven years ago; the Steel role is virtually full-time now.
Last season, when things were “really tough”, Bloxham would get phone calls and texts from Taurua offering support. “Even now when I’m stuck, or not sure where to go to, Noels is a person I can always call on,” she says.
Netball NZ’s head of coach development, Tania Karauria, “has this uncanny ability to check in on you just at the right time.” Karauria also set up a mentoring relationship between Bloxham and Tricker, who coached the Black Sox and was called the “All Blacks’ secret weapon” for his pivotal role in their 2011 and 2015 World Cup successes.
“Even though he’s in the States, any time I reach out to him, he’s there the next day or the day after; he’s so generous with his time,” Bloxham says. “It’s really important you have somebody you can call on when things are tough, as well as when things are going great.
“Don just breaks things down and makes them really simple. And I’m a very simple person, so we work quite well together. He’s like, ‘What are the key things you want to focus on? Make sure you always go back to those things.’”
Back with a feather in her cap
Still in her 40s, Bloxham has coached the Steel through 109 matches – 61 of those victories. But some days she feels as though she’s just starting out.
“The main reason I’m still here is because I love my job; I feel absolutely privileged to be in this role. And I’m still learning; every season is different. There’s always a new challenge and I don’t think I’d want to be anywhere else,” she says.
The Steel’s 2024 premiership season, starting with an away match with the Tactix on Sunday, has dished up some challenges for Bloxham already. English shooting star George Fisher has been ruled out for a second straight season, unable to recover in time from last year’s serious knee injuries. Ivari Christie and Jen O’Connell suffered concussions in the pre-season, while captain Kate Heffernan has been nursing a niggly ankle.
But the return of four experienced Steel players – former captain Shannon Saunders, defenders Erwood and Taneisha Fifita, and shooter Jen O’Connell – is exciting, Bloxham says.
“Those players have come back with different mindsets. They’re thriving in the challenge of being here every day, grateful for another opportunity to have a go,” she says. “I’ve chosen them again, because I know they’ll put in the hard work and effort to ensure we’re always aiming to improve and be better each week.”
Bloxham has returned with a new mindset, too, after working with the Welsh Feathers at the World Cup. “It was by far one of the coolest things I’ve ever been part of,” she says. “Again that was because of Tania and Noels who arranged it, and the cool way they look at things.”
She spent five weeks in camp in Cardiff before the world tournament, and only realised when she got there it was the first time the players had come together, too.
“At the first training, I was like ‘Oh my god, they can’t catch, they can’t pass, they can’t do all these things. Where do I start?’” she says. “But we built each week, and they were so open and the players were so hungry to learn and grow.
“It felt like home to me. The Welsh people are like Southlanders – very friendly, very welcoming, very open. When I came back I said to everyone: If you ever get the opportunity to go to a pinnacle event, no matter what country you’re representing, just go for it. It’s such an amazing experience.
“It also stirred something within me, something I really want to be a part of. I love my job with the Steel, but you’re always aiming to improve, to go that one step further. So [coaching the Silver Ferns] is definitely in my sights.”
But first there’s a matter close to home – to get the Steel back to their winning ways. Kate Heffernan has every confidence in her accomplished coach.
“I love working with Curls, she creates such a great team environment,” she says. “She’s really relaxed, or she tries to act like that, and that composure helps everyone around her. She’s really open to anything Shannon or I are keen to try, and she’s always super approachable.”
And now the cat’s out of the bag that she’s a whitebait patty connoisseur, Heffernan says the team will be approaching her for those, too.
