Rugby Southland has labelled New Zealand Rugby’s plans for its men’s elite competition structure “encouraging”, saying it aligns with Southland’s views on the situation.
New Zealand Rugby has confirmed a preference to retain Super Rugby Pacific as well as a 14-team NPC to support New Zealand’s professional player pathway.
It followed speculation on what might unfold following a recent summit which was sparked by New Zealand Rugby’s need to find about $20m in savings.
Any talk of a reduced NPC from the current 14-team format would have put Southland’s position in the top-flight provincial competition in jeopardy.
However, the NPC’s importance to New Zealand Rugby’s player pathways has received heavyweight support from the likes of All Black head coach Dave Rennie and former All Black Conrad Smith, who is now New Zealand Rugby’s Head of High Performance.
“Those sort of endorsements of how important the NPC is to the New Zealand Rugby ecosystem, I think, played a part [in the decision],” Rugby Southland’s board chair Murray Brown told The Tribune.
Where New Zealand Rugby will now look to find savings is to consolidate the existing Super Rugby Clubs and provincial union high- performance environments within the five main centres.
So the likes of Otago and Highlanders will share services to reduce costs.
How that will look around staffing and ownership models still needs to be worked through.
But it would include combining the likes of Otago and the Highlanders’ academy programmes.
The nine regional provincial union academy programmes, including Southland, will remain in place, as is, but with stronger partnerships expected between regional unions and Super Rugby Clubs.
Brown said “our academy is actually working very, very well” and was pleased that the work that was currently happening would largely continue as is.
But he said there have already been some discussions initiated around ways Southland could work more closely with the Highlanders around its pathways work.
“The Highlanders have already talked about some of our [Southland] boys in Dunedin and how we manage them, and using the Highlanders’ gym a bit more because we are doing that a bit in isolation, so some of that work has already been done over the last couple of weeks,” Brown said.
A concern from some in the regions, on the back of combining the likes of Otago and Highlanders, is whether it will provide Super Rugby-based provincial teams a significant advantage when it comes to NPC player recruiting.
For Rugby Southland, and other provinces, the quest is for an even and sustainable spread of talent across both NPC and Super Rugby teams to ensure both competitions remain exciting, credible and evenly contested.
Meanwhile, in another potential cost-saving measure for New Zealand Rugby, in time, Super Rugby will be managed by a separate holding company (HoldCo).
The hope is that it will also enable New Zealand Rugby to focus more on growing the NPC through increased attendance, stronger fan engagement and advertising.
Brown said overall Thursday’s announcement was very encouraging from a Southland point of view.
There was still plenty of work ahead for New Zealand Rugby in that quest for a sustainable future, with other areas of the sport now to be looked at.
It includes the New Zealand Rugby staffing structure, funding of the women’s domestic competitions and the “Teams in Black”.
