As players prepare for this weekend’s inaugural finals, former NBL head Justin Nelson tells how the Tauihi league was brought to life – and celebrates how much it’s already achieved.

This story was first published on Stuff.

The rise of New Zealand’s first professional women’s basketball league, Tauihi Basketball Aotearoa, over the last eight weeks has been quite extraordinary. Those who have attended games will attest to the talent and fierce competitiveness on display. Awesome.

Players from as far away as Argentina, Sweden and the United States have put on a great show. Kiwi stars like Micaela Cocks and Jillian Harmon have returned home for the first time in years. This shiny new women’s competition has made people sit up and take notice. As it should, because Kiwis are bloody good when it comes to playing basketball.

Fans have turned up in their thousands and the competition has enjoyed unprecedented television coverage on Sky Sport where every game has been broadcast live. That coverage will go to another level when this Saturday’s Tauihi grand final will also be televised live free-to-air at 6pm on Prime.

Tauihi has delivered ramped-up storytelling across Stuff and other media, social media numbers have exploded, and viewers have enjoyed the action from across the world on the YouTube channel of Fiba, basketball’s global governing body.

Tauihi has immediately cemented itself as a quality women’s national sporting competition, adding to a widening women’s sport offering that includes fantastic competitions in netball, rugby and cricket.

For a rapidly rising number of hoops fans, Tauihi is perfectly positioned on the calendar. It comes off the back of ANZ Premiership, which has also seen players sharing their elite talents as cross-coders, an apt name for those playing in both competitions, like Aliyah Dunn and Parris Mason.

Bold brands and team names, new colour schemes and five fresh franchises notably backed largely by private ownership have helped propel women’s basketball into a new era.

By design Tauihi (which means to soar) and its five teams promote inclusion, diversity, culture and community. The building blocks are solid and have delivered an immediate connection up and down the country.

Take a look at the social media platforms of the franchises and you will instantly see a bold, in-your-face and gritty culture being displayed. The messaging is pointed, and it’s good.

To their credit, the teams are unashamedly (as they should) pushing key social topics, like pay parity and empowering women. While others tiptoe around the edges, Tauihi is hammering home the conversations that are needed and must be had. And best of all, those conversations are being led by women.

And why is this important? Because that’s what New Zealand’s youth is connecting with. They want to be loud and proud, they want to be included, and they want to be central to the decisions that are being made.

Tauihi has done this in spades.

Elite Kiwi and international players are now showcasing the global game at a level never seen before in Aotearoa, and strong crowds and audiences are again shining a spotlight on the community’s increasing passion for basketball.

While Tauihi has been a runaway success in the eyes of many, it may be surprising to learn the ground-breaking plans for the sparkling new women’s basketball league can be traced back nearly two years. That’s what you call a journey.

Believe it or not, the road to launching Tauihi was long and quite arduous at times, particularly when you fold in Covid and the difficult conversations that come with change. What’s the saying – “to make an omelette you need to break a few eggs.”

However, the road has also been filled with excitement and anticipation. Most of all, Tauihi has delivered a new beginning for the players, and for the players to come in future years.

But where did it all start? Let me take you back to November 20, 2020. It was a chilly Friday night at Pulman Arena in South Auckland where a creatively named women’s basketball tournament known as the 18in18 was in night two, with the Canterbury Wildcats playing Auckland Dream.

I was coming towards the end of my second year as general manager of the NBL and had recently been handed the task by then Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) chief executive Iain Potter to take on the leadership of the long-running Women’s Basketball Championship (WBC).

Though I was originally brought to New Zealand to manage the men’s national league, my immediate past as the general manager of the Melbourne Boomers in the Australian women’s national league pushed Potter to ask me to look a bit deeper into the WBC and see what could be done to take it forward.

The WBC had a long and storied past, supported by local associations faced with the constant pressures of finding enough dollars to individually support a women’s programme and get teams on the floor for annual games.

Though the competition somewhat staggered from year to year, credit to those at the coalface of those associations across the country for maintaining a competition. They did the hard yards and kept a flickering flame alight.

In 2020 the 18in18 featured six basketball association-owned teams – Auckland Dream, Canterbury Wildcats, Otago Gold Rush, Harbour Breeze, Capital Swish and Waikato Wizards.

Just two years later, none of those six teams are involved in Tauihi.

At half-time on night two of the 18in18 I remember walking away from the court and calling Potter. I spoke with a level of frustration and concern for what I was seeing, questioning the direction and future of women’s basketball, and importantly the pathway into the Tall Ferns, our national women’s team. He agreed.

It wasn’t that the players or standard of the game I was watching wasn’t good. It was more that we weren’t seeing the best Kiwi players because they were off playing overseas, and we needed a competition that could attract elite internationals to help raise the bar, attract fans to games and help develop our homegrown players.

Due to a lack of money, marketing, structure, governance and strategy, it felt like we were literally putting the teams and players out on court with both arms tied behind their backs.

It was also a worry that barely 100 people were in the stands, mostly family, which as it turned out was a good crowd during the 18in18. The commercial support at the time was also gravely concerning, with barely $50,000 in revenue to run the whole event. What’s the saying – “doing it by the smell of an oily rag.”

During the call with Potter we spoke deeply and passionately about needing to elevate girls and women’s basketball, to provide a meaningful pathway to the Tall Ferns that was more visible. And we wanted to raise the commercial bar to help Kiwis come home and play on home soil in front of family and friends and earn money to help them build a professional career in the game.

At the time (and probably still to this day) the most frustrating thing for me was being in a country where so much fanfare and accolades are given to women’s rugby, netball and cricket – and deservedly so, they all do a wonderful job and deliver an elite product. And yet women’s basketball was being left behind when it came to media coverage, sponsorship and funding because our best players weren’t here and international stars had no incentive to come to New Zealand. They were all overseas making a living and building a career where they were valued financially.

Put simply, the public couldn’t fall in love with elite basketball players if they weren’t seeing them, especially our Tall Ferns stars.

So that’s where the journey started. One phone call back in 2020 in late November was the catalyst to change women’s basketball.

Fast forward to late 2021 and the stars were aligning with Sky Sport and GJ Gardner Homes coming on board, followed by Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) being fully invested in bringing in a new dawn for the women’s sport. The support of all three cannot be understated.

While the concept of five new franchises, private ownership and pay parity compared with the men’s league were tabled before both Potter and I left BBNZ, I cannot speak highly enough of Megan Compain, Huw Beynon and Dillon Boucher for taking over and leading the charge. And both Rob Gold, and before him Brian Yee, also deserve credit for leading the BBNZ board through some incredibly tough decisions to help bring Tauihi to life.

The toughest of all conversations was to advise the six incumbent WBC teams that women’s basketball was going in a new direction, and it would no longer include the same WBC brands. Nor would it allow any of the five new franchises to be owned by an association to a level any greater than 33%.

Effectively, those six teams, after years of propping up the WBC, were told the new direction would dilute their position in it, perhaps even to the extent they may not be included at all. A bold move, a complete change, a new direction. Conceptually, from the initial vision that was formulated back in 2020, this was the most critical move.

Change is hard, but the conversations that come with change are often harder. I know there were some unhappy people at the time, but hopefully what we have seen unfold across the inaugural Tauihi season provides them with confidence that girls and women’s basketball has been the big winner.

For years back in Australia I had seen basketball associations fall over off the back of trying to run teams in the professional ANBL and the WNBL competitions – I had even been a part of one and it was awful. The financial stress was enormous. Fact is, basketball associations are there for the community, for the grassroots, to grow participation, and not to financially prop up the elite. So many now defunct Australian franchises learnt this the hard way.

So now we fast forward to the early 2022 when five new franchises were awarded licences, and Wellington-based brand experts EightyOne helped to deliver new brands, fresh colours and a bold new direction. It was genius and the vision was complete.

Compain, still to this day our only Kiwi to play in the world’s top league, the WNBA, was instrumental in building hype and pushing for excellence from within. Beynon, in his first year as general manager, did a superb job in mustering the media and shouting about Tauihi from the rooftops, while also leading his administrative team through the rigours of setting up a new competition.

And of course, and I preface this by disclosing I now work for Sky, adding the investment and broadcast of every game by Sky was the critical piece – it was both the glue and the rocket booster.

Amid all the changes, for me, the number one priority (and vision) when the Tauihi journey started was to make sure our athletes were loved, respected, elevated and rewarded. The days of the WBC saw most players battling to get a few expenses covered, let alone being paid to play. This had to change if we were to be taken seriously.

Pay parity had to be the centrepiece of Tauihi. It was the one non-negotiable I had during that phone call back in 2020. Our elite women must be paid the same as our elite men.

We had to show people we were going to lead, going to walk the talk. While so many other great people have brilliantly put the finishing touches on Tauihi, I am happy nobody ever wavered from the vision of pay parity. In some ways, it is the legacy I will always reflect on most proudly.

Importantly, from here future growth means others, many more, must step up.

To be fair the same can be said for all women’s sport, Tauihi isn’t alone in this battle. Attracting commercial support is incredibly tough – just ask every other women’s sport franchise playing in a national New Zealand league and I guarantee you this is their toughest challenge.

Since joining the Melbourne Boomers in the WNBL back in 2015, you would not believe the number of big businesses I dealt with who publicly pushed how important it was to financially support women’s sport, splashing it across their websites and promoting it in advertising campaigns, yet behind closed doors they would tell me they preferred to sponsor men’s sports. They would come back to me if they had any dollars left over.

It was maddening, and I’d love to one day have the courage to call a few of them out, but I figure it would be wasted energy and probably detrimental to my own career.

And while not every company has been willing to back the commercial pitches for the NBL or Tauihi, I’ve always fallen back on the belief that “build it and they will come!”

So, let’s build it.

This Friday and Saturday the Tauihi Final 4 in Nelson will be broadcast nationally on Sky and Prime, and internationally across Fiba’s YouTube channel. It’s been two years in the making, but the last eight weeks have shown that professional women’s basketball has arrived in New Zealand, and it is here to stay.

Do yourself a favour, tune in, take a look and remember the journey. Two years of twists and turns, but absolutely worth every second of it.