Taurua Silver Ferns’ drama: What happens when the player and coach relationship breaks down in high performance sport

Saturday, 11 October 2025

Long-serving administrator Heath Mills fears New Zealand athletes could be hesitant to come forward with concerns amid the Dame Noeline Taurua coaching saga.

Mills, the chief executive of the New Zealand Cricket Players’ Association since its formation in 2001, deplored the online vitriol directed at Silver Ferns players, describing it as “horrific”.

With Taurua stood down for the rest of 2025 and likely to have coached the Silver Ferns for the final time, it has turned into a public witch-hunt to find the players, who first raised issues with the decorated coach.

Mills, who shares the same office as the New Zealand Netball Players’ Association (NZNPA), worried other Kiwi athletes might be wary of speaking out in their environments, given the flogging the Silver Ferns had copped on social media.

“It really saddens me to hear the abuse that is going on on social media towards young women in this netball team. In fact it’s horrific. They already are in a difficult situation where matters have been raised in an employment context with Netball New Zealand,” Mills said.

“What will start to happen if this continues is no-one will ever raise anything. There might be some horrific things happen, which we’ve seen in other sports and reviews in the last 10 years in New Zealand going on in environments, and I definitely won’t talk about it because I am just going to get smashed publicly. That in turn makes the situation a whole lot worse for an athlete. Where do they go? What do they do?”

The Taurua coaching situation has raised questions around whether athletes and players’ associations in New Zealand wield too much power when a prickly situation arises.

Former Silver Ferns defender and top-level netball coach Tanya Dearns, now chief executive of the Wairarapa Bush Rugby Union, sympathised for coaches when there was a clash with the playing group.

Dearns, who played the bulk of her career with Taurua, stressed the Netball World Cup winning coach’s fitness standards and expectations of the players had not altered since taking on the job in 2018.

“I guess what’s changed is the generation of athletes coming through,” she told Sport Nation.

Former Silver Ferns coach and defender Yvonne Willering noted the NZNPA played a vital role, but questioned whether it was too easy for players to go to them when they had a grievance. Like Dearns, she said it was an almost helpless situation for a coach, when a problem popped up or results were not going their way.

Willering never dealt with a NZNPA as Silver Ferns coach with the association created in 2007 with the advent of the trans-Tasman netball league. She empathised with coaches, who were fearful of saying or doing something wrong and the backlash that could come from that. Willering joked whether there needed to be a coaches’ association for high performance coaches in New Zealand to support them through the good and the bad in the challenging professional sports landscape.

“I would hate to have a situation whereby players the moment they have a gripe or something they head off to the Players’ Association. Don’t make that that easy,” Willering said.

“There will always be issues. That’s high performance sport. There’s always highs and lows, but surely they can be addressed in your own sports environment, rather than rushing off to a Players’ Association.”

When drama has surfaced in New Zealand sports environments in recent years, the coach has been the common denominator to go.

Black Sticks women’s hockey coach Mark Hager left controversially in 2019. Hager had been at the centre of a review into the environment within the national women's team. A group of seven former Black Sticks, all whom played under Hager, wrote a letter to New Zealand Hockey in support of him, showing the disapproval was not universal.

Former Black Ferns rugby coach Glenn Moore resigned in 2022 after allegations from a player, which ultimately sparked a review into the culture and environment of the New Zealand women’s rugby side. Moore strongly rejected the “misleading” allegations.

Football Ferns coach Jitka Klimkova walked away last year just three years into a six-year term following an investigation into an undisclosed employment matter. Football Ferns players were reportedly unhappy with how New Zealand Football handled allegations of inappropriate behaviour by Klimkova.

In cricket, former Black Caps coaches Glenn Turner and Andy Moles both eventually lost their jobs after player power prevailed.

The Taurua coaching saga was unique to those examples, but on past evidence it would take something drastic for her to keep her position.

Mills disputed the notion player power was influential in New Zealand sport.

“It’s well documented now with the many, many reviews that have happened in the sports in New Zealand over the last 10 years that athletes are at the bottom of the table when it comes to power imbalance.

“We know there’s huge power imbalances for athletes in sport, where offering an opinion about how the environment is or how things are done is very challenging for athletes to do that because the people who are in charge ultimately determine whether they’re picked or not… The notion that the athletes have power is just nonsense.”

While there had been some high profile coaching disputes in New Zealand sport over the past decade, Mills did not believe there was a systemic issue.

Across the various sports (internationally and domestically) there were well over 50 high performance teams in the country. In cricket alone, there were 14 with the Black Caps, White Ferns, and 12 domestic men’s and women’s sides.

Netball had seven with the Silver Ferns and the six ANZ Premiership teams.

Taurua-gate had dominated the headlines and talk back radio, but was a relatively isolated incident, Mills believed. Even prime minister Christopher Luxon weighed in this week in a radio interview, saying sometimes employees did not like their boss.

“Most of those environments are managed and are operating very, very well. I’d be very cautious for people when an issue does come to the fore, or there are problems or matters being raised, to say that’s a big problem across the country,” Mills said.

“That’s just blatantly not true because of the vast number of environments which are operating.”

Respected sports administrator and former New Zealand cricketer Martin Snedden said it was paramount athletes had an environment where their representatives could put views forward to the national organisation.

Snedden was New Zealand Cricket chief executive from 2001-07 at a difficult time when New Zealand's professional and domestic cricketers went on strike for six weeks in late 2002. He was later head of the 2011 Rugby World Cup organising committee and has served on a multitude of boards in sport and business.

“Players are dedicating their lives to what they’re doing and it’s really important to include them in what’s happening as much as it is anyone else in the sporting family you’re dealing with,” Snedden said.

Cycling New Zealand, which Snedden is board chair of, had an initiative at each board meeting, where there was an allocated slot for the five representatives that sit on the athletes’ leaders group to speak to the directors.

Chief executive Simon Peterson and management stepped away from the room and the representatives were given carte blanche (complete freedom) to discuss whatever they wanted with board members listening respectfully. Snedden described it as invaluable for both the board and athletes.

Having worked extensively in high performance sport, Snedden, a former lawyer, said it was a demanding landscape. Tension arose from time to time and there were a raft of personalities. Not everyone in a team were best mates. When a sports side was struggling the chances of an issue blowing up in the environment was heightened.

“People need to understand high performance is volatile. You’re on the edge and things can go brilliantly or they can go haywire and that’s the nature of the environment you’re working in…

“Everyone has to buy into what sort of environment it is, the athletes, the coaches, the high performance people directing them, the chief executive, and the board. All of them have to have a cohesiveness about how they see the high performance environment.”