Yvette McCausland-Durie wants to end her national league coaching days as a four-time champion with the Pulse. She tells Suzanne McFadden about her next challenge restarting a historic Māori boys’ school and a possible future with the Silver Ferns.
It’s hard to imagine, but in a year from now, Yvette McCausland-Durie could be busy cleaning dorm rooms at a revived Māori boys’ school nestled in the Bombay Hills.
It's certainly an adjustment from her high-performance coaching life, nurturing and training some of the country’s top netballers within the Pulse franchise in Wellington - and her career as hands-down the most successful coach in the ANZ Premiership.
But this role as a school head will be the next phase in the life of McCausland-Durie - from promising international sprinter and netballer to transformational teacher, mother of two and victorious netball coach, on the verge of an unprecedented fourth national league title.
At the end of this premiership season, just over a fortnight away, McCausland-Durie will wrap up her ninth and final campaign with the Pulse (she also ‘finished up’ at the end of 2020, but was drawn back for two more seasons).
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She then heads to Fiji to work with their national Pearls side before joining them at the Netball World Cup in Cape Town in July as a specialist coach.
And then she can start packing. She’ll move from Palmerston North to Auckland at the end of the year with husband, Nathan Durie, and together they’ll run the resurrected Tīpene School – the Māori boys boarding school also known as St Stephen’s in its previous life, that sat derelict for two decades.
Trailer for 'The Mana Enhancer - Yvette McCausland-Durie' documentary
In a way, it’s like going home. The couple, who also co-founded Manukura School in the Manawatu, used to live on the St Stephen’s grounds in Bombay when Nathan – a former student - was the assistant principal there, and Yvette taught at Rosehill School in nearby Papakura.
It's a “really big challenge” that means so much to them.
“I can’t wait,” says McCausland-Durie (who’s Ngāti Awa and Ngāpuhi). “I love starting projects, I love having that ability and some autonomy to create things and get them to a point where it’s good to go and someone else can pick it up.
“And it’s so important for that shift for Māori boys – they are so far behind, they have so much potential.”
St Stephen’s closed its doors in 2000, after more than 150 years teaching young Māori. The school has sat idle ever since. But many of its old boys have banded together to rebuild it – again as a Māori boys boarding school - and reopen in February next year.
“I’ll do a bit of everything there initially,” 51-year-old McCausland-Durie says. “I’ll do lots of admin, planning and curriculum stuff. Some days I’ll be working in the hostel, even as a cleaner or a gardener. We’ll do a bit of everything and anything. That’s what we love about it.”
She’ll miss a lot about working in high-performance netball, having been involved in sport most of her life. She was first a top youth track and field athlete, sprinting at the 1990 junior world champs, then became an exceptional netballer – part of the New Zealand U21 side who won the World Youth Cup in 1992. She first coached Special Olympics athletes before giving netball coaching a go, mentored by Silver Ferns coach Leigh Gibbs.
She’s also a firm believer that once you’re a coach, it’s a role for life.
“There’s always a team who need a coach, eh?” she laughs. “I’ll go and coach out in Counties. I’ll be back into school netball, standing out in the rain on a Saturday in my big coat. I love it.
“I love seeing the growth of young people and the joy they get from netball. Whatever it looks like, I’ll keep involved.”
At the same time, she’s not ruling out returning to the international coaching realm. The former New Zealand U21 and New Zealand A coach, McCausland-Durie was also the Silver Ferns assistant coach during Janine Southby’s head coach reign (infamous for the Ferns’ fourth place at the 2018 Commonwealth Games).
“I’d never say no to any opportunity. Every time I coach it’s about evolving and I don’t think I’m ever perfect. But I’ve really enjoyed coaching at that level, and the growth I’ve had from the Comm Games through to this point, so I would never say never. I will always look at things,” she says.
But she’s aware, too, of the “busyness” of running a school. The couple helped set up Tū Toa Academy school back in 2005 (McCausland-Durie took their netball team to be national secondary school champions). In 2013, they created Manukura School - focusing on academics, sport and te ao Māori – and will finish up there this year to work at Tīpene.
“I want to be able to commit fully to this and support Nathan – it’s something he’s always wanted to do,” McCausland-Durie says. “So I’ve been away faffing around doing my thing for long enough, I better go and try to be helpful.”
Kristina Sue, the Black Fern and Sky rugby commentator who’s an educator and coach at Manukura, says she’s been privileged to be guided by the Duries.
“They are real problem solvers and they are doers,” Sue says, in a new documentary on McCausland-Durie made by the Coach for Life Foundation. “Nathan and Yvette have really led by example; they are people who care about everyone they meet.”
McCausland-Durie has no doubt her two careers are intertwined.
“I think there’s a really neat synergy between teaching and coaching and that opportunity to try to make a positive difference to people,” she says.
“You look at players or young people as they go on in their careers, or have families, and seeing them as really positive citizens, happy in what they’re doing. That’s what it’s about – having more good humans in the world contributing.”
She’s hugely proud, she says, to see students she’s taught go on to become top netballers – like Pulse defender Parris Mason. “She has something about her that makes you want to play for her,” Mason says of McCausland-Durie in the documentary.
And shooter Emma-May Murray-Fifita, who helped Central Manawa to win this year’s NNL final (the competition just below the ANZ Premiership). “She was our Manukura captain years ago, and she had a player of the match performance,” McCausland-Durie says. “They know how to play and rise to an occasion. It’s really cool to see.”
After winning back-to-back premiership titles in 2020, McCausland-Durie left the Pulse and went back to teaching. But when the team dived to fifth the following year, she came back – hungry to coach again.
This time around, she led the youngest team in the premiership right back to the top in 2022, and this season, the Pulse are the first franchise to reach the finals series. It’s now down to a shoot-out this weekend between the next three teams – the Mystics, Stars and Tactix – to find out who claims the remaining two spots in the play-offs.
“I left [the Pulse] loving it and it will be the same this time,” McCausland-Durie says. “I absolutely love it, especially working with the people here. And I actually really enjoy being in pressure situations and trying to take a group to a place where they’re not expected to be - to help them stretch.”
Up against it last year, she saw huge potential in the players she had – on and off the court.
“I wanted to make sure they knew how good they were, what they bring to the game and as people to the environment they’re in. But one of my ultimate goals over that two-year period was to develop young leaders,” she says.
“We’d lost a lot of experience when a lot of our older players moved on. So it was a really big mission for me to grow a group of leaders.” And she's done that with Kelly Jury, Tiana Metuarau, Whitney Souness and Maddy Gordon.
“I’m really proud of the leadership that’s evolved from the group, and that for me is the most important thing. No matter what happens, they know they have a voice, a way to shift and change things.
“Winning grand finals is amazing, but it’s all the effort that goes into growing the ability to make decisions under pressure, to be the best team-mates they can be to each other, and be mana enhancing in the way they behave.
“I feel really confident this group can go on and be an amazing team for years to come.”
While the Pulse have been improving incrementally this season – to the point of defeating previous table-toppers the Mystics by six goals in their eighth win on the trot last weekend – McCausland-Durie doesn’t believe they've played to their full potential yet.
“I thought the same at this point last year,” she says. “And then in the grand final we played the most consistent netball – our best netball – and that’s amazing.
“I’m really proud of the little bits of growth they’ve made this season. So now it’s helping them stay confident, keep accentuating the things they’re good at. And about delivering consistency under pressure.”
Her specialist role with the Fiji Pearls at the World Cup, alongside head coach Una Rokoura, will be a different test – they’re ranked 19th in the world, and McCausland-Durie wants to help them finish in the top 12 in Cape Town.
“It’s going to be tough. You look at the lack of resource they have, but then the huge resource they have in their people; their resilience,” she says. “It’s about building confidence and courage, what have we got to lose?
“It’s an event I’ve never coached at, so I need to be challenged on the ground; learning on the spot.”
Then McCausland-Durie is looking forward to moving north and being closer to “home” – she grew up in the small rural settlement of Tangiteroria, between Whangārei and Dargaville.
“My daughter lives down here in Wellington with me at the moment, but she’s thinking of coming with us, too,” she says. “Our son is a farmer in the Wairarapa and he will stay down there; he can’t stand the city.”
She’s prepared for the “massive challenge on different levels” that come with reviving an historic boys’ boarding school. “Firstly, in the physical space, getting the buildings and the hostel up to spec, then making sure we have programmes 24/7 that are engaging and being really creative in presenting learning in another way, not just the 9-to-3 model,” she says.
But then McCausland-Durie has never been afraid of tackling a challenge.
* For more on McCausland-Durie's philosophy of growing better people first, athletes second, watch The Mana Enhancer - premiering this Saturday, 9pm, on Sky Sport 2 and on watch.coachforlife.nz from 9.30pm
