Taranaki coach’s Tonga fairytale
In March 2022 a group of young women from eight cities across New Zealand and Australia met for the first time at Sydney airport. Five days later they were playing together as the Tonga netball team and, with new head coach Jaqua Pori-Makea-Simpson at the helm, they were champions, going through a PacificAus tournament undefeated. The PacificAus tournaments are attended by Pacific Island countries and Australia U-19 teams. Countries such as Singapore and Malawi are sometimes invited to compete. When Pori-Makea-Simpson accepted the role as Tonga’s head coach such victories seemed nearly impossible, despite the lofty ambitions of the game’s administrators. Already with a fulltime job as head of Netball Taranaki, she was tasked with getting a team ranked 42nd in the world into the top 10, getting them to the Netball World Cup and then to win gold at the Pacific Games. “Clearly I was thinking ‘you’re nuts’,” she said of the expectations she felt were unrealistic. But by the end of 2023 the team was ranked eighth in the world, had reached the quarterfinals of the Netball World Cup and won gold at the Pacific Games. “If you dream big, genuinely believe, then it’s possible.” The fairytale started a year after PoriMakea-Simpson, who grew up in Waitara, returned to Taranaki in 2018 after many years of playing and coaching in Australia. She had returned to take the general manager role at Netball Taranaki. Then, in 2019, after she had applied to Netball New Zealand to get her Netball Australia accreditation recognised here, she got an email from Netball New Zealand telling her Tonga was looking for a new ahead coach, Pori-Makea-Simpson, who is Cook Island Māori, said. “I’m Tonganised now. I feel Tongan. I very much feel like a huge part of the Tongan community and I’ve been embraced by their country beyond belief.” The team had their first competition under her leadership in 2019, she said. “Then there was a break because of Covid and we didn’t regroup until 2022.” By then the lack of games meant the team had dropped out of the world rankings. In January 2022, they were invited to compete in a PacificAus sport series in Sydney two months later, but Tonga had just experienced a tsunami and earthquakes and Covid had got into the country, she said. “I had no equipment, no uniforms, no netball team, no staff. And because of Covid we couldn’t do selection trials so we were very limited in how we were going to create a netball team. “So, I literally scoured social media and the internet for Tongan netballers who had been identified in netball pathways across Australia and New Zealand. I was using all of the contacts I had created to make a netball team.” Not surprisingly, the young women weren’t expecting her call. “They were a bit ‘ who are you and you want me to do what?’,”she said. The players flew into Sydney five days before the competition started. “At the airport I was literally looking for tall Tongan young women that looked lost, because none of us had met before. We went on to win that series undefeated.” They then went to the World Cup qualifiers in Fiji in July. And won. In April they had the same result at a tournament on Australia’s Gold Coast. By that time their ranking had reached seventh in the world. In June that year the Queen of Tonga gifted them the name Tala, and since then the team has been known as Tonga Tala. In 2023, the team got into the quarterfinals of the World Cup ending with a world ranking of eight. Pori-Makea-Simpson nailed the last goal in December when Tonga Tala won gold at the Pacific Games. Lots of people have been asking PoriMakea-Simpson the same question, she said. How? “There is a deep sense of connection and selflessness that is a part of Pacific culture that was embedded in them as young women. Putting others before themselves. That sense of belonging is something I haven’t seen before. It’s hard to describe.” All this success begs the question - does Pori-Makea-Simpson want to coach the Silver Ferns? She pauses for a while before she answers. “That’s the ultimate isn’t it? But for now I’m sitting in this place and concentrating on what’s the best thing for Tonga and the next step and the next four-year cycle. And to maintain our current world ranking, which is going to be our biggest challenge going forward.”