Trailblazer

HAMILTON, New Zealand — The kids gather around their soccer coach for a pre-practice talk, but she doesn’t dive into tactics or conditioning.

Instead, she lectures the young players on spiritual concepts from the Maori people, or indigenous New Zealander. She talks about mana, the concept of essence, or one’s internal power. And whakapapa — one’s roots, family, land, tribe. A charismatic, smiling woman of 45, she has the kids’ attention from start to finish.

This is Tarena Ranui, and she is leading the charge to reshape the landscape of soccer in her country and establish a New Zealand soccer identity from the nation’s indigenous roots.

Ranui coaches the senior women’s team and several youth sides at Melville United, a club in the country’s third division. She founded Melville’s women’s academy program in 2019, and in the same year, she was named New Zealand’s junior coach of the year.

Of all the coaches in the country, Ranui is the only Maori with a B-level coaching license, the second-highest certification a coach can have.

When New Zealand and Australia hosted the Women’s World Cup last summer, FIFA talked up unity and respect for indigenous peoples, but it only went as far as opening each match with a ceremonial call to play.

Ranui wants more. Her life is devoted to imbuing the sport with the values of her people.

A sense of home in soccer

“Soccer coach” is not Ranui’s day job.

She teaches physical education at Ngaruawahia High School, a mostly Maori school 20 minutes outside of Hamilton in the Waikato region of the nation’s North Island.

Until a year ago, the school had no air conditioning or heating. Buckets collected rainwater from leaky roofs.

New Zealand ranks its schools based on economic need on a scale of 1-10 — 10 signifying the least amount of economic need.

Ngaruawahia is a 1.

Assistant principal Andrea Kingi said if Ranui wanted to leave Ngaruawahia, she would have her choice of jobs in education.

“She could be teaching anywhere. She could go to another school, and they'd be so lucky to have her,” Kingi said. “I think it's the love she's got at this place and the kids.”

Ranui wants to help Maoris reach the highest level of soccer in New Zealand. And she is just as determined to accomplish this goal from within Ngaruawahia.

“I want my every student to understand that to be from here, to be Maori, to come from Ngaruawahia is more than enough to compete with the best,” she said. “It’s more than enough.”

Ranui, herself a Hamilton native, grew up playing soccer in the 1980s. There were so few female players in the area that she competed on all-boys teams until high school.

Her whole family played soccer. Her older sister even played in college in the United States for Missouri and, later, Metro State University of Denver.

Ranui, then just 17, followed her sister to Denver and started as a freshman for Metro State. Witnessing how the sport had taken off in America was an “eye-opening” experience.

Simple things like soccer shorts were a rarity when she was growing up in New Zealand. Even on national youth teams, female players had to borrow uniforms, usually from boys’ teams.

“You were sort of on your own here a little bit in New Zealand as a female footballer at that time,” Ranui said. “To show up in the U.S. and just seeing entire girls’ leagues and entire girls’ programs was quite phenomenal.”

On the field, Ranui thrived. She was the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference freshman of the year in 1996 and a mainstay on the all-conference first and second teams across her four seasons.

Ranui may have adjusted quickly to Division II soccer, but in that time, she also endured a growing sense of isolation.

“That sense of aloneness has still stayed with me 25 years later,” said Ranui. “I guess my most influential experience is showing up as a 17-year-old out of one of the poorest areas in New Zealand as a footballer in the U.S. and learning what it means to be alone in everything. Navigating the aloneness and almost homelessness.

“I had community, I had friends, but I didn't have a sense of home inside,” she said, “and that stayed with me.”

Maori soccer mom

She went home to New Zealand after she graduated from Metro State in 2000. A decade later, it was her son Carlos’ turn to begin his soccer career, with his mother as his coach.

Her first-ever team was made up of Carlos' primary school friends. They were from Hamilton, mostly Maori and “we did it our way,” Ranui said.

“Most of the time they weren’t even in soccer uniform. They were just (wearing) whatever. We would show up, and we would win.”

These kids weren’t concerned with excellence or even winning: They just wanted to play.

This forced Ranui to find a new way to motivate them. Her son’s team was her “little prototype.” She began to explore what it meant to play as Maori, developing the same concepts she uses on her women’s teams today.

When Carlos and his friends started winning, people started to notice — but not necessarily in a positive way.

“There’s not very many primary-age teams that are predominantly Maori,” Ranui said. “Then when they were good, it was sort of like: ‘Well hang on, how did this happen? There must be a reason. There must be something you’re doing illegal in order to produce this.’”

Opponents’ parents sought extra referees to observe games and officials to check players’ ages. Some took their bigotry to Facebook, said Ranui’s husband, Harold.

“They'd get a lot of complaints about being overly physical,” he said, “Or ‘They're too old.’ ‘They're in the wrong age group.’ ‘They're too big.’ ‘Show us your passports.’”

Ranui continued to coach those players until they were ready to be integrated into the academy and club level. But it would always be difficult to keep them in soccer, a sport without a tradition for Maoris.

Many players on that team later traded soccer for sports that their family or fathers played like rugby, where indigenous New Zealanders are more traditionally represented.

They lacked a sense of community and belonging, a sense of whakapapa and source of mana, after moving on from Ranui’s youth team.

Carlos now plays for Wellington Phoenix’s academy, currently the lone New Zealand club in the Australian A-League. On his own journey through the elite levels of the sport, he faces the same challenges his mother did in college, decades earlier.

“I recognize it, I see it and I can see it replicated in kids now all these years later,” Tarena Ranui said. “So my single most driven thing at the moment is to give these kids a sense of autonomy that they can establish their own mana and protect it.”

At home on the field

Melville United’s women’s program is designed to give its players just that.

Ranui built a holistic and relationship-based approach to club soccer. Players still train in a high-performance environment, but indigenous athletes now have a sense of belonging to draw on when they move to the next level.

For many girls like 17-year-old Stevie-Lee Tiller, Ranui is their first Maori coach and often their first female coach.

“It shouldn’t be such a massive thing if you’re Maori or whatever culture you are,” said Tiller, who like Ranui grew up playing on all-white boys’ teams. “But just being able to go up to her and know that we are the same, it’s really cool.”

Under her guidance, the Hamilton-based club has earned promotion through the ranks of New Zealand soccer — and Ranui has gained recognition as a coach.

Ranui was called up in September to be an assistant coach for the under-20 women’s national team. She was not only charged with helping the Football Ferns in practices, but also worked to instill a team identity based in the land they come from.

And she’s on the rise. She is now in the 18-month-long process of earning her A-level coaching license, so she can serve as a head coach in the national team system.

Last spring, Ranui received a grant to travel and study high-performance athletics around the world. She spent time with the San Diego Padres, Angel City FC, UCLA women’s soccer, and Japan and Cameroon’s women’s national team systems.

She came away convinced of the “brilliance” that exists in her own culture.

To see is to be

Her mission, she said, transcends personal gain or legacy.

“It's not about accolades — I've never been driven by that,” said Ranui. “It's about the story that's within, and I think it belongs on the world stage.”

That story began hundreds of years before the first Europeans reached New Zealand in the 1640s. Polynesian voyagers, who are now known as the Maori, were the first people to settle in the country in the late 13th century.

Ranui is inspired by those ancestors. Their stories tell of wayfarers who navigated the oceans, and of their triumphs of survival and preservation over the centuries.

“Those stories exist here,” she said. “I think it teaches us a lot about how we can move, how we can perform and how we can compete.”

These stories have yet to be translated to the highest level of New Zealand soccer.

At the 2023 Women’s World Cup, where New Zealand co-hosted the tournament, just three of the 23 Football Ferns could trace their lineage to Maori roots.

By contrast, when the Kiwis hosted the Women’s Rugby World Cup the year before, more than half of the players on its 30-person championship team were Maori.

University of Auckland sports professor Toni Bruce said she knows no research suggesting that discrimination against Maori exists across youth soccer culture. Nonetheless, “in practice and in public consciousness, you could say that soccer is seen as a predominantly white sport,” she said.

Because there are so few Maori players at the highest levels of soccer in New Zealand, “there are very few role models,” Bruce added.

Currently, New Zealand’s men’s and women’s national sides are not coached by Maoris — or even by New Zealanders.

Former national rugby player and current high-performance coach Tawera Nikau said Ranui’s immersion in tikanga, Maori practices and culture, allows her to break these barriers for the next generation of players.

“We're predominantly a white, English-orientated football culture, where you have a lot of experts from the UK in New Zealand football who haven't fully embraced our indigenous background,” said Nikau, whose daughter is coached by Ranui.

“Tarena is a trailblazer.”

That trail is widening: Three of Ranui’s current players, including Tiller, are earning their C license, ensuring there will be Maori coaches to raise that next generation of New Zealand soccer players. And, Ranui hopes, to elevate the sport to new heights with new stories.

“To see New Zealanders on the world stage compete, more than that to win, you can’t retell those stories,” Ranui said. “The things that when you see with your naked eye, and you feel, and you can hear, and your senses are alive — it births something inside of you.

“I think for me, to see is to make it possible to be.”