Reps - Day One

Dontay is a representative for the Under 10 Counties Manukau Maori Rugby League team. His iwi is Ngati Raukawa. Dontay had his first tournament in the weekend. and has written about his first day. There are some great photos of him playing on their Facebook page. Well done Dontay, Mrs Poole is very proud of you for getting into a representative team. I am sure one day you will be playing in the NRL!

Reps - Day One

It was very very early on Saturday morning and I woke up to hear my Mum say, “Dontay it’s time to go.” I jumped out of bed with an excited look on my face. First we had to drive all the way from Auckland to a marae in Ngaruawahia to get our gear blessed and say a Karakia, then it was another 25 minutes worth of driving to the field and we accidentally ran over a wild rabbit. When we got to the field we did some warm ups and game plan drills.

It was our first game together as a team, as we kicked off I remember the big forward from the other team charging at me. My teammates were there to support me in the tackle, luckily for us he had lost control of the ball and now we were attacking. Boom a boy from our team busted through, all we could hear was “Go Stevenne go!” That try was followed by 5 more for us and 2 for the opposition. Yay we had won our first game. But the second game wasn’t so easy we lost 56 nil.

After that game we had a sausage in bread each and did stretches, warm downs and talked about how we could’ve won that game. It was coming close to our last game of the day, I gulped some water and ran over to my coach. He told us to not let the opposition play the ball and try slow them down so our team has more time to get ready to defend. I caught the ball from their kickoff and ran right into their defense line. I jumped back up straight away to play the ball, kapow! My friend goes right around them and took us to the goal line, they passed to me and I went straight through to score the try . Straight off of the next play our team pulls six more tries out of a hat the score was 42 nil.

 At the motel I was staying in, I was so battered and bruised I just wanted to lie down but as soon as I saw the animals at the motel a smile appeared on my face as stared at 4 peacocks, 1 pig and 3 roosters.

 By Dontay