Mike's Minute: Noeline Taurua has been badly treated

Noeline Taurua isn't the first coach to be badly treated.

But she might be the most successful and well regarded.

Sport is a funny thing, especially nowadays where it seems to want to walk a line between being successful and being modern, or dare I suggest the word "woke"?

Last week when reports of players feeling unsafe emerged I didn’t even know what they meant by that.

"Unsafe" is something that might happen in the dark, in an alley. It’s a physical danger thing, as opposed to an emotional state on a court.

On a court you can be exhausted, or exhilarated, or furious, or elated. I just can't work out how you are "unsafe".

Which in part is the problem. It's an invention or a new derivation of the word. Your “environment” has been interfered with.

Even if you accept its new usage it’s the sort of thing you might find on a university campus among the angsty.

On a sports field or court it has no place. Even less so if that court is at the elite level.

Cycling had a horrible time, but that was abuse. Is netball talking about abuse? Does Taurua abuse people? That doesn’t seem to be the suggestion.

Next problem is the lack of clarity, if not honesty. All reports seem to indicate "unsafe" is code for the coach being old fashioned, demanding high standards and not putting up with slackness.

We used to like that approach. That approach was the norm.

The only purpose of elite sport is victory. It exists for no other reason than to let a chosen few express themselves in a way where they win and others can piggyback by way of TV licensing and ticket sales.

Unless Noeline Taurua has had a personality transformation and they are all wandering around at Netball NZ going "what happened to Noels, man she's changed", which I suspect hasn’t happened, then what we are left with is the inescapable conclusion that Taurua is the victim of soft management in a world where every crybaby is “heard” and the ultimate victim, in an irony of irony's, is one of the sport's greatest exponents.

She is benched while the woke in the boardroom wreck the national women's sport.

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