Former Black Fern Teresa Te Tamaki is now head of performance therapies for the Chiefs. Balancing her physiotherapy career, owning a business, and raising two kids, she keeps the passion for rugby flowing.
On the sidelines of every Chiefs game, you can find the Waikato team's physio, Teresa Te Tamaki. When injuries inevitably arise, it's her job to assess and treat them, making key calls on whether a player can continue.
As a former Black Fern, Te Tamaki knows exactly how it feels to be in their boots.
That first-hand knowledge of the game is essential to her approach as a physiotherapist.
“It’s about the demands of the player, knowing what it feels like to be really knackered and have to get up and go again,” she says. “And knowing that actually players can push a little bit harder. Like, I know you’re sore, this is happening, but I'm really confident it's stable and you can keep going.”
Te Tamaki played 10 tests for the Black Ferns over the course of her professional rugby career, beginning in 2007 and closing with the North American tour in 2015. She was also part of the Aotearoa Māori Sevens from 2004 to 2011 and captained the Waikato NPC team for three years beginning in 2012. She's now the lead physiotherapist of the Chiefs rugby club, one of several balls she manages to keep in the air each day. The others: running her company Lifestyle Physiotherapy and raising two toddlers.
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Te Tamaki played netball growing up, but lost touch with it after a year playing for AUT. But something sparked when she followed her friend to Takapuna Rugby Club just down the road.
“I hadn’t done any rugby growing up, just mucked around with my brother in the backyard,” Te Tamaki says. “And then I started playing, and it all sort of clicked. That was me. Netball was done.”
She played a few seasons for Takapuna, then Auckland Marist, and Auckland Storm in the NPC. In 2007, she moved down to Hamilton, where there were no club teams at the time. For several years, she drove the two-hour commute to Auckland three or four times a week, just to keep playing the game.
“I started playing, and it all sort of clicked. That was me” - Teresa Te Tamaki.
That same year, 2007, she made her debut with the Black Ferns. That’s where she met Jacinta Horan, the physiotherapist who helped her work through some back pain as a player.
“She sort of helped mould me as a sports physio,” she says. “She was quite assertive, confident. That was someone I'd watched and been like, okay, that’s cool. And it definitely influenced how I do things.”
Like any career, Te Tamaki’s had ups and downs, including some periods of non-selection. She broke out of one of these dry spells when the Black Ferns selected her as a hooker for the 2015 tour. She considers that time a highlight of her career — not just for Black Ferns, but for the Waikato NPC team she had, by that point, helped establish.
“Our 2014 Waikato team was just awesome - we were a young group punching well above our weight,” she says. “Black Ferns was like a bonus.”
Te Tamaki hung up her boots after that tour. Though her professional rugby days may be over, they remain relevant everywhere in her work as a physio. She’s done some coaching for the Waikato women’s sevens as well, but physiotherapy is her main professional focus.
“With physio you get to be just a little bit more hands-on with players,” she says. “It’s pretty satisfying because you’re in the mix of it. You can really have a positive influence on being able to get players back in the game.”
For Te Tamaki, the game is what it’s all about. Physiotherapy lets her stay connected to the sport, but at the end of the day, there’s something untouchable about rugby itself.
“It’s so different, and I miss it so much,” she says with a laugh. “There's nothing like actually playing.”
The future of the game
As well as the Chiefs and running her company, Lifestyle Physiotherapy, Te Tamaki is also raising two young children, ages two and six. Though she likes to keep her home life relatively separate, sometimes the kids come to work with her. She recalls a time when her daughter was six weeks old and got to sleep in the dugout during a game.
Young rugby enthusiasts are witnessing an exciting time for the sport, whether from the sidelines or the living room floor.
“It’s so awesome to see what the girls could achieve for the World Cup,” Te Tamaki says, referring to the groundbreaking Black Ferns' win in 2022. She hopes we can channel any newfound attention on New Zealand rugby into the club level, to build a strong foundation for future players.
“It’s the depth and it’s the growth,” she says. “We need to keep bringing coaches in at grassroots level… and developing everyone so that our women’s game can flourish.
“I just think it's so important to enjoy the game and enjoy the memories,” she says. “When you're at the top level, yeah, there are a lot of sacrifices, and it's not all fun and games. But to get there is a privilege in itself, to be able to actually do that for a living. I just think it's so important for girls, for young players, to enjoy and make the most of it.
"Rugby’s pretty special.”
