Grace Nweke has overcome distance, racism and a brutal netball education to emerge as a Silver Fern

Intrigued, she made her way over and casually asked: “Do you play club netball?”

This was not unusual for Manuel-Nathan who, in 25 years delivering the post, had often stopped girls in the street and asked them whether they played based purely on their physiques. She had a ready-made sales pitch to try to convince them to give it a go.

This time, the shy girl looked at her and mumbled something about playing a little bit at school.

“Are you good at netball?”

“Sort of,” she recalls the girl saying.

A week later Grace Nweke, 13, was wearing the goal shoot bib for the New Jaks Senior A team against a team of hardened women. It went about as well as you’d expect.

The first time Nweke was fed the ball it burst straight through her hands and out of court.

The second time around, same result.

Damn, thought Manuel-Nathan, I never did ask her if she knew how to catch.

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On the rare occasions Nweke’s brain did send signals to her hands in time to grasp the ball, they bypassed her feet. She’d get called for stepping time and again. She’d forget to jump; at other times, anxious to rectify that mistake, she’d jump too soon and be on the way down as the ball careered hopelessly over her head.

“I couldn’t catch the ball,” Nweke recalls. “I didn’t know how to play the game, how combinations worked. How to move. I had no clue.”

What did Manuel-Nathan see in you, then?

“I was tall.”

Everything about her presence on the netball court pointed to a tenuous existence. She was the epitome of uncoordinated. Her technique, skill and feel for the game was years behind the rest of the typical Kiwi kids who had been playing earnestly and under instruction since primary school.

Yet Manuel-Nathan saw something beyond the frame that she felt was worth persevering with. An internal hardness, steely resolve – insert your own cliche. Nweke fit nicely into the New Jaks philosophy, which was to provide a place of refuge, particularly for Maori and Pasifika girls in the area, many who grew up in poverty and some in unstable homes.

Nweke did not fit that criteria, but in her own way she too was an outsider.

In a year, Manuel-Nathan reckoned, Nweke had learned to catch. In two, she had enough connection between her hands and feet to do a passable impression of a netball player.

Rachel Rasmussen, who has played for both New Zealand and Samoa, was also at the club and coached at Avondale College, which Nweke attended. The former defender also devoted time and energy into taking the block of raw clay that was Nweke and moulding her into a goal shoot.

A few years on from that she is, in many people’s eyes, the future of New Zealand netball. Already people are talking about her becoming as influential as a past player with African heritage that won a lot of things in the black dress – Irene van Dyk.

Jenny Woods, a long-time netball commentator and observer, believes that might be underselling it, saying Nweke has the potential to be better.

If you stop and think for a minute about van Dyk’s legacy – 217 international caps across two countries, a world champion, two-time Commonwealth Games gold medallist and a career 90 per cent shooter – that’s quite some court shoes to fill.

It’s also quite a leap to make when the Next Van Dyk is still trying to work out who the First Grace Nweke is.

Four years ago, she was still a “gumbie” (her word), trying to make sense of a netball court and life in general. Now, if she recovers from damaged ankle ligaments, the first major injury setback of her nascent career, she’s on the verge of being selected for her first Commonwealth Games.

“I wouldn’t know what to say to my 16-year-old self,” she says, “I’m not sure I would recognise her.”

*****

Nweke gets her height from her parents, Fortune and Chi-Chi.

She also gets their sense of a higher purpose, their belief that education holds the keys to a full and prosperous life, and a faith that might have turned agnostic over the years if church attendance is any gauge, but still gives her a strong sense of right and wrong.

Mum and dad left Lagos, Nigeria, in the 1990s, seeking a better life in South Korea. They had an African restaurant in Seoul that mainly served the expat and diplomatic communities.

It was Fortune’s idea to move from Korea to New Zealand, where he sensed something more spacious and idyllic. And it’s true, there are places like that here but few would put West Auckland into that conversation.

Squeezed between two harbours and framed by the Waitakere Ranges, its sprawling blue-collar suburbs are home to some of the most talented, and toughest, kids in the country.

The school grounds weren’t the easiest places to be if you were sensitive. Nweke, pronounced with an ‘N’ so soft it’s almost silent, heard a lot of stuff she’d rather not.

“Yeah, I definitely did, but I feel like any family coming into New Zealand probably did,” she says. “There was all the usual bullying and name-calling because you looked and sounded different.”

It would be nice to say that netball provided a bit of salvation from the catcalling, casual and often overt racism, but far from it. Manuel-Nathan, herself a proud Maori, almost recoils when she recounts what Nweke had to play through.

“She got a lot of hard-out stuff,” Manuel-Nathan says.

She doesn’t want to dredge up the worst of it, but said she heard the word “black” being used as a pejorative far more times than she’d like to remember. Even if some of it was borne of jealousy – Nweke didn’t move or play like a classic netballer yet her height made her unstoppable – it was still tough to take.

“I’d go up to people and tell them to keep their comments to themselves. Most were too scared to say anything after that,” Manuel-Nathan says.

At one tournament they played, Manuel-Nathan took the microphone afterwards to chide the players and parents because, “Grace got a lot of crap she didn’t deserve”.

Nweke wasn’t immune to it, she just chose a higher path.

“If people were ignorant and didn’t want to get to know me for who I was, that was their problem, not mine,” she says.

She didn’t push back on the barbs. Sometimes that required restraint, but there was a bigger picture in mind.

“Sometimes I wish I could be that person. There were times it was harder to let something go but if I responded to everything that was aimed at me it would have taken too much out of me,” she says, before delivering a line that seems so worldly (and sad) you have to double check that it’s a 20 year old who has just delivered it.

“I didn’t want to play into those ‘angry black woman’ tropes.”

*****

Towards the end of high school the head, hands and feet were starting to work together and Nweke was on a high-performance fast track that would have been impossible to imagine a couple of years earlier.

She was playing in a national development league and, out of the blue, was offered a training partner contract with the Northern Mystics, Auckland’s professional netball team.

“It was an unorthodox thing for [coach] Helene Wilson to do. The contract was for $2500. My mind was blown,” Nweke giggles.

In 2019, while still at school, she was elevated from training partner into the first-team squad. The meteoric rise seemed appropriate; fully grown at 1.93m she was a towering presence.

She was, however, still far from the finished product.

“If you look at my shot map, I was still a one-trick pony.”

It was a good trick, though – enough to get her selected for the Silver Ferns for the series against England last year. Making your full international debut should be a time of great joy, a time of family and friends coming together in celebration of a peak being scaled.

On the other hand …

“It was a horrific build-up to a debut.”

To cut a long Covid story short, Nweke was in Auckland, which was in lockdown due to growing case numbers of the-then dominant delta strain of coronavirus.

“Because I’d been around the squad I had allowed myself to start imagining what [a debut] would be like and it was nothing like I thought it would be,” she says.

“It was two days of practice and I’m playing against England.”

The Auckland-based players required exemptions from the Government to join the squad and so there Nweke was, having barely shot a ball in anger in weeks, finding herself marked by Geva Mentor (CBE), one of the greatest to have ever played the game, in the second Test of a three-Test series.

“You’d think you knew where she was and she wasn’t there anymore,” Nweke says. “Instead she’s in the space that you want to move to. A very clever player.”

In truth, it wasn’t the most convincing debut. She shot 16 of 20 and didn’t look overawed as much as she did rusty, which was understandable. She missed the third Test.

She travelled with the Ferns to London earlier this year and struggled in bit-part roles against Australia and England before cashing in off the bench (30 goals from 32 shots) against South Africa.

After four Tests her 82 per cent shooting success is starting to look healthier; her demeanour on court is starting to look more proprietary.

She’ll never get another debut, but she will get many more chances.

*****

When talking to people in and around netball for this story, there was one mild criticism of Nweke that came through.

To distil it into one paraphrased quote, it might read like this: “I’m not sure she loves the game enough to reach her full potential.”

It’s hard to sit down with somebody for an hour and try to psychoanalyse how much anybody truly feels about anything, but it’s entirely possible, probable even, that the glib assessment above is less about Nweke’s love of netball and more about a generational shift.

Like many Millennials, she wants it all.

“I want to play 200 club games. I want to be a household name in the Silver Ferns,” she says.

She can point to strides she’s already made on the court, in particular her mental toughness. Sensing weakness, in her early days opposition teams would try to get inside her head, pushing her physically and probing her psyche. There was one ANZ Championship game in particular when she says she “was left in tears of rage” by the opposition.

That doesn’t happen now. Mental skills coaching has taught her to harness the emotion and turn it into a positive.

She’s still largely known as a catch-and-shooter, but she wants to start to play a bit of goal attack to broaden her range of skills beyond the circle. She says people have looked a bit sideways at her when she’s mentioned this but she’s undeterred.

“I know I can do it,” she says. “It might not be the traditional way of playing goal attack, it will be my way.”

But it is true, however, that she refuses to be defined by her netball.

She’s studying for a commerce degree at Auckland University. She wants to work in information systems, in Big Tech. At some point “something might have to give”, but right now Nweke is right where she wants to be.

She’s earning decent money for playing a game, something that still amazes her and her parents. She’s shooting goals, taking names and is well on her way to becoming that “household name” she aspires to.

She’s doing all that while keeping an eye focused on life after netball.

Not bad for a girl who couldn’t catch a ball a few short years ago.