• Kaila Ru-Tearoiti and Tamara Otene.
  • Valerie Chang, Tasia Soeprajogi, Tayla Woolley and Alyssa Wilson.

Extraordinarily talented volleyballers make NZ Senior Women’s team

At just 17 years of age, talented athletes Kaila Ru-Tearoiti and Tamara Otene have both been selected for the New Zealand Senior Women’s Volleyball team and the New Zealand U-23 Women’s team. 

It’s going to be a very busy year for these Year 13 students, with the Senior Women’s team competing in a test series against Australia in Wellington this month and then travelling to Korea for the Asian Champs in August. The Under-23 team is travelling to Vietnam in July to compete in the Asian Champs. 

Kaila and Tamara were selected following a combined camp over Easter that included players from the Senior Women’s Team, as well as the U-23 team. “It was four days with two three-hour training sessions including talking about the values that are significant to us as players,” says Tamara. 

Both students have represented New Zealand as juniors and are looking forward to the challenge of volleyball at a senior level. 

“I received a phone call from the Senior Women's head coach asking me if I wanted to play alongside the senior women in the NZL vs AUS test series in Wellington,” says Kaila. "I was shocked as I was only 16 at the time and never thought I was good enough to play with the top players in New Zealand. I’ve never played for New Zealand in New Zealand, so I’m excited to play in front of friends – and my family will watch the live stream.”

Tamara is also looking forward to the experience. “I’m excited to play with the senior women as they are more experienced and I can learn so much from them. They are an awesome bunch of women and I’m humbled to be a part of the test series team.”

Kaila and Tamara were both part of Westlake’s Premier Volleyball team, which won every game and every tournament they entered this year. They were the North Harbour Super League Champions, Auckland Premier League Champions, gold medalists at the Auckland Champs tournament, and won gold at the NZSS Indoor Volleyball National tournament for the second year in a row. Both players were named in the Tournament Team following that event. 

 

EveryBody Eats thanks to winning idea
During the first weekend of the Term 1 holidays, my team and myself from Year 13 Business Studies, competed in a high school Case Competition, which was run by Social Innovation New Zealand. The Case Competition is called adviSE and is open to high schools in Auckland each year. adviSE required us to use critical thinking, problem solving and real life strategic planning and implementation.

We were given a real-life, local social enterprise called Everybody Eats, which is a restaurant that is run purely by volunteers and donations from customers, who provide meals during the week to those who can’t necessarily afford food. However, they encourage people who do have money, to also attend and be willing to donate however much they like for their meal, whether that be $1 or $100.

The idea is to promote diversity and bring people of different backgrounds to the same space as a whole. Their problem was: “How can we increase the number of paying customers without having them feel guilty that they may be taking a meal from someone less fortunate and who cannot afford a meal?”

We had three hours, locked in a room without internet, to come up with solutions to solve this real-life problem. My group and I worked very efficiently together and all had the motivation to do well. The  three hours flew by so incredibly fast and we were then required to present our final solutions in a seven-minute presentation to a panel of judges, which included the manager of EveryBody Eats. Following this we had a quickfire Q&A from the judges, which also lasted seven minutes.

As a team, we came up with two innovative and realistic solutions which were to:

1. Allow volunteers for EveryBody Eats to not just work in the restaurant or kitchen, but use their different and diverse range of skills to be able to educate and positively impact the community. They could do this through providing school talks to educate younger generations about the business and its aims, as well as the issue of food poverty and food waste in New Zealand. This would bring a positive brand image to EveryBody Eats and hopefully, increase the number of paying customers.

2. Work alongside existing restaurants which are well known and regularly patronised in the community, and hold one night every three months of the year, where EveryBody Eats is able to run their restaurant in the location of the existing, well known restaurant. This would attract a different group of customers and expand EveryBody Eats’ brand image within the community, while bringing in more money from customers.

Overall, this experience was truly one of a kind. It required my team and I to come together and work as one to be able to come up with practical and innovative solutions to the issue, and be able to present these clearly to the judges. adviSE truly challenged our way of thinking about businesses and the problems they face in real life. It was great to be able to use critical thinking and really think outside of the box when coming up with solutions. Our dedication and teamwork paid off, as I am proud to say that my team and I took away the first place award for the Social Innovation adviSE competition for 2019.

By Tayla Woolley
Team Leader and Innovator Extraordinaire 

 


Issue 99 June 2019