Netball champs Tu Toa congratulated on campus

A celebration for the Tu Toa Academy netball team, winner of last month's national secondary schools championship, was held at the University’s Te Kupenga o Te Mätauranga marae on Friday.

University staff and students joined with members of the team from the academy, which leases Massey facilities at Hokowhitu.

It is located at Kura Awa at Massey’s Hokowhitu site. It has 30 students drawn from throughout the North Island who have been selected to participate in one of the three coaching programmes of netball, golf and tennis.

“Their win is amazing; Tu Toa is a small school and quite new," said Associate Professor Huia Jahnke, who head Massey's Mäori and Multicultural Education, which hosted the function.

In its five years of operation the co-educational correspondence school has qualified for the national netball finals every year, coming third in 2005 and 2007 and fourth in 2006.

This year, in a nail-biting finish with Mt Albert Grammar at the SBS Events Centre in Timaru on October 9, Tu Toa took the title 34-33, making a comeback after trailing by seven goals at half time.
Coach Yvette McCausland-Durie, who graduated from Massey with a Master of Education last year, and who also coaches the Central Pulse netball team and New Zealand Under-21s, attributed the team’s success to their conditioning. “Winning is about a process, and we were committed to being the very best prepared team entering the competition.”
Ms McCausland-Durie acknowledged that the girls had made a huge number of sacrifices to maintain the lifestyle of an elite athlete when, “they just wanted to be teenagers like everyone else”.

Tu Toa is also punching above its weight academically, with a large proportion of its students progressing into university study, according to educational co-ordinator Nathan Durie, Ms McCausland-Durie's husband and also a Massey graduate. He completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Sport Management with a major in coaching in 2000.

"Our students know they also need to succeed in their studies," Mr Durie says. "Five of our graduates are already at Massey and another four are planning to go there next year. We see it as a natural progression for players who want to stay in our coaching programmes. Massey has been great in giving us access to facilities and we’re very grateful for that.”


http://www.tutoa.co.nz/news.html
http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/sport/2950734/Tu-Toa-team-takes-national-title