Not so level playing field for sports part-timers

Playing on the domestic sports fields throughout New Zealand, part-time professionals struggle to compete with their full-time counterparts.

Everyone is aware that the All Blacks and the Black Caps make a great living from their sports careers, but what about the players that have to play them in domestic competitions?

Baden Kerr is a part time professional rugby player. As Counties Manukau’s rookie first five-eighth, he is only on a professional contract for the length of ITM Cup season.

Kerr says the more experienced players with Super rugby contracts “have experience, learning off the better coaches as well as more strength and physicality.

“You notice it when you try tackling Neemia Tialata,” he laughs when recalling trying to tackle the All Black prop in the match against Wellington earlier in the season.

Among his team, a couple of them study while the others are primarily tradesman. Players contracted to Counties Manukau earn between $20,000 and $35,000 and the contracts only last for half the year.

He guesses that players with children and family match incomes with their partners.

However, there are some advantages to being a semi professional alongside the full-time professional players with Super rugby contracts. “I guess because they’ve been playing all year are jaded, semi professional players are fresh and keen.”

New Zealand’s premier summer code has a similar problem at the elite domestic level.

Each of the six cricket associations gives 12 players contracts for each season, which involves a salary paid from October the 1st as well as match payments for each match played.

Auckland Cricket’s operation manager, Adrian Dale, says the seasonal nature of cricket is “not an ideal situation.”

Dale is in the unique position of having been a former professional cricketer himself. In his fifteen year career in the United Kingdom with county side Glamorgan, Dale was contracted professionally for six months of the year over summer.

He spent the off-seasons during his career backpacking, doing real estate and in Glamorgan’s marketing department, as well as several seasons playing club cricket in Auckland in the off season. At the beginning of his career part of his salary was used o pay his fees at the local university, which allowed Dale to debut for Glamorgan during his last year at university.

He looks back at the off seasons in his own career fondly but with a little regret. “The advantages were I got to travel the world, never had a winter for 10 years and had a great life having far too much fun.”

In terms of regrets, Dale says he perhaps it would have been more beneficial to have “work experience to be better qualified for real life work.”

Twenty three year-old Roneel Hira is in his fourth season as one of Auckland’s 12 contracted players.

A lot of Hira’s teammates live by on their season long contracts and find something else to get by on during the winter. Some of them are tradesman and do temping or contracting over the winter.

Many of them ply their trade as cricketers overseas, particularly in the UK during the New Zealand winter.
This is something Hira is not interested in: “I don’t want to get stuck in the lifestyle of going to England every
winter and getting on the booze and having fun. I don’t see it going anywhere.”

‘Stuck on the cricket treadmill’ as it is called in cricket circles.

Instead Hira has spent the last two winters at University doing a Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences. He says it is “tough at times, juggling lectures, tutorials and trainings.”

Nineteen year-old fast bowler Lockie Ferguson is at the beginning of a promising cricket career.

Ferguson is not contracted by Auckland cricket but is part of a 20 man training squad for the coming season. He wants to play for Auckland this season and in coming years hope to represent New Zealand.

Like Hira, Ferguson is juggling his cricket aspirations with student life doing a business degree. “University is the priority but then I still make time for cricket. I want to get my degree out of the way as quick as I can.”

Ferguson says if he were awarded a contract in the future he would cut back on papers at university.

Hira says the Black Caps have the financial security to focus on “bettering themselves as sportsman,” while many of his teammates are forced to find an alternative living during the off season.

To viewers of domestic sport in New Zealand, the competition appears fairly even, but in many cases part-time professionals are punching above their weight to compete with their full time professional counterparts.