How Mila Reuelu-Buchanan learned she was more than netball

Saturday, 13 June 2026

With her year split between club and international netball, Auckland and Porirua, Mila Reuelu-Buchanan understands what it means to live in two worlds. She talks to Laura Hampson about Commonwealth Games selection, the fragility of professional sport and the life she is building beyond the court.

If auras exist, Mila Reuelu-Buchanan’s would be bright pink. Loving, generous, unguarded, the kind of presence that adds ease to any room she’s in. You notice it quickly in the way conversation moves like you’re old friends. It’s a steadiness that feels surprising once you learn how much of her life is spent in transit.

For half the year, the Silver Ferns midcourter is based in Tāmaki Makaurau with the Northern Stars, living with her mum and squeezing in time with her niece and nephews between games. The other half, she is back home in Porirua with her fiancé, All Black and Hurricanes flanker Du’Plessis Kirifi, her dad and her wider community.

“I’ve got the best of both worlds,” she says. “Just quality time here and quality time back home.”

Reuelu-Buchanan has just turned 28, and as we walk to get a coffee – she orders matcha, “I’m one of those” – she tells me about her birthday a couple of weeks prior which, unusually, wasn’t swallowed by the ANZ Premiership calendar. Kirifi, or ‘Dups’ to those closest to him, had asked her how she wanted to spend her day. Dinner out just the two of them, or something with friends and family? She didn’t hesitate. At home, with family, eating Italian food.

“He said, ‘I could have guessed that’,” she says. “I’m a massive people person. Just Italian at home because I love pasta.”

Kirifi cooked – fully committed in a chef’s outfit, making vodka pasta, sourcing tiramisu and producing a handwritten menu – while family and friends were secretly brought in.

“I felt very loved … he really did the most.”

It’s a small window into how this Silver Fern moves through the world, happiest when surrounded by her people. That same warmth shapes everything else, the way she talks about Porirua, about her parents and about her heritage – her mum is Cook Island Māori, her dad Tokelauan Samoan.

Right now, she’s in an in-between period. This weekend is the last of the ANZ Premiership playoffs before teams head into the finals.

When we speak, she is waiting to see if she has been selected for the Silver Ferns Commonwealth Games squad that will be heading to Glasgow next month. The team will be announced next week.

“The reality is it’s competitive in every position on the court,” she says. “It’s always been the middies that have been so competitive, but now the shooting and defensive end is just as competitive too. I can only be confident in what I’ve put forward.”

Current Stars coach and former Silver Fern Temepara Bailey says one of Reuelu-Buchanan’s defining qualities is the energy she brings both on and off the court.

“The ability to transition from attack to defence and to do that at 100 miles an hour is a quality that midcourters need, and she's probably one of the few that has that,” Bailey tells me over email.

“She’s a player that everyone wants to be around or have as part of the team.”

For Reuelu-Buchanan, if selected, it will be her first Commonwealth Games as part of the core squad. Soon after her Silver Ferns debut, she was selected as a travelling reserve for the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

“Obviously it’s a privilege to be there, but the reality is it’s hard, you’re not quite part of the team but you’re still having to show up,” she says. “You’re not actually part of the 12.”

Four years later, her potential selection feels particularly hard-won. In 2024, Reuelu-Buchanan ruptured her ACL. The injury was catastrophic – she tore almost everything in her knee.

“I had to learn to walk again,” she says. “That was crazy.”

Bailey, who stepped into the Stars coaching role in 2024, describes the injury as “devastating”, but says the recovery reinforced what many around the Stars camp already knew about Reuelu-Buchanan’s character.

“She’s got a very strong mind and is very determined,” Bailey says. “It showed when she came back on how diligent she was.”

For someone whose entire life had revolved around netball, the sudden stillness forced a reckoning.

“My life was so consumed by netball that I didn’t realise that I had other great things in my life. Not that I didn’t realise, but didn’t appreciate,” she says.

“[It] reminded me that it’s not the be-all and end-all, and that I am Mila without netball. That was quite special and a turning point for me.”

After 10 months spent recovering, her return to international netball last season came during an especially turbulent period for the Silver Ferns environment, following the short suspension of Dame Noeline Taurua and the intense public scrutiny that surrounded the team last year.

“It was challenging in the sense that I was getting lots of game time, [but] there was a lot of outside noise with what happened with everything in New Zealand but also people having their opinions on us as players,” she says carefully, though she refers to her coach warmly as ‘Noels’.

“I’m not usually one to read the comments or whatnot. And the one time I did … it really hurt.”

Kirifi, who understands elite sport scrutiny himself, talked her through it and told her not to give the trolls the time of day.

“From then on I just had this mentality of [don’t] give a f…,” she adds. “Everyone’s always gonna say things and have their opinions … I was just out here playing for the Silver Ferns. That was my mindset.”

That certainty feels deeply connected to the way she was raised. Reuelu-Buchanan talks about her childhood not in terms of hardship, but stability.

“I didn’t grow up in a privileged home, if I’m talking financially,” she says. “I grew up in a privileged home in the sense that I always felt valued, felt grounded and loved. And prioritised. That’s what you need as a child.”

Sport sat at the centre of that upbringing. In Porirua, she grew up on the sidelines of club games, watching her mum play netball at the same courts she would later play on herself. Before long, she was playing netball and touch, the latter becoming her main sport for a time. She eventually represented Aotearoa at age-group level before the reality of specialising arrived.

“It got to a point where I had to choose,” she says.

By then, netball pathways were beginning to open. Selection for the New Zealand under-21 side made the idea of one day becoming a Silver Fern feel tangible, and led to a training role with the Central Pulse. At the time, however, the team was stacked with experienced veterans, meaning younger players often had to wait their turn.

“You learn to sit back and do your time,” she says. “But it does get to a point where you do need game time in order for people to see you.”

The opportunity came when former under-21 coach Kiri Wills encouraged her to move north. It was during her first season with the Stars that she completed her bachelor of social work, a path shaped in part by growing up around parents deeply involved in community initiatives. She later worked in the police Family Harm team before moving into a role with Women’s Refuge.

“That was heavy stuff,” she says. “It gave me a different perspective.”

At the time she was balancing work and elite netball simultaneously. The reality, she explains, is that even now, most netballers have second jobs with teams shifting schedules to allow players to work during the day before evening trainings.

“We’re still having to work other jobs, and unless you’re in the Silver Ferns and you have that second salary, which again, in comparison to the likes of rugby and I can say this because my partner’s a rugby player, it’s really not that much,” she adds.

There is frustration in the way she talks about it, but not bitterness. More disbelief that New Zealand’s most-played women’s sport still requires so much sacrifice from its athletes.

“It’s because we’re women, let’s be honest,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m not saying that [rugby players] don’t deserve what they get because they do. But we also deserve that too.”

Still, her focus repeatedly returns to what netball has given her – the friendships, the travel, the sense of purpose, the young girls who see themselves reflected back in her.

“I always say it’s bigger than just me,” she says. “I don’t put that dress on just for me, I put it on for everyone else, for my country, for my communities, for the little girls and boys who can look at me and relate to me whether it’s my culture, my background, and know that these things are possible. That’s really why you do it.”

When she first made the Silver Ferns, she remembers waiting outside a room with the other players, being called in one by one to find out whether they had made the team.

“It’s brutal,” she says. “You’re trying to figure out if they didn’t make it, does that mean I made it?”

When her own moment came, coaches Taurua and Debbie Fuller delivered the news.

“I remember thinking, what the frick? I couldn’t believe it.”

Outside, Kirifi was waiting to pick her up. “I rang him and I remember he cheered so loud that I’m pretty sure I heard him through not just the phone, but outside of the hotel room.”

This supportive nature has been a common thread throughout their relationship, which began with the hallmark of modern dating: a direct message on Instagram. After a bit of social media back-and-forth, Kirifi eventually asked her out. The connection was immediate.

“He said, ‘I really enjoyed that and would love to take you out on another date … how does tomorrow sound?,” she says. “I was like, ‘OK, relax’.”

Six years on, they are engaged and planning a wedding for the end of next year.

Publicly, the couple occupies an almost mythologised space in Kiwi sport – a Silver Fern and an All Black navigating demanding careers side-by-side – but privately, she says, it often comes down to learning when the other person needs a partner rather than another athlete. She recalls one instance where she was upset about not starting against England.

“Meanwhile Dups is also experiencing not getting any game time with the All Blacks, so he’s trying to be there for me and it’s something that we’ve had to learn to navigate.”

Yet she insists jealousy has never entered the relationship. “You just genuinely want the best for each other.”

Their busy schedules haven’t stopped them putting down roots. In March, they bought a 1970s home in Paremata, tucked down a long driveway, surrounded by bush and birdsong.

“It feels like our own little safe haven,” she says. “Especially when our worlds are on display and chaotic, you come home and it really feels like that. I’ve got a lovely view out to the moana.”

As we talk about the life she has built – a career she loves, a home of her own, a solid community – her warmth and ease makes me think about auras and what hers would be, when she tells me about a recent moment between herself and Kirifi when she was back in Porirua.

“We were reflecting on our lives, like what a life that we get to live,” she says, before adding: “It’s not something that was just given to us. We had to work for it.”

Despite everything she has already achieved, there’s still uncertainty ahead – professional sport itself is inherently temporary, something her ACL injury made clear.

“All I know is that we want to help people, whatever that looks like,” she says. “Regardless of whatever happens with netball, I know that whatever I do, I think I will be pretty content with my life.”

Not because the sport matters less now, but because her life has grown larger around it.

The ANZ Premiership is available live and free on TVNZ 2 and TVNZ+, 4pm and 7pm Saturdays and 4pm Sundays.