Under the bright lights on Hamilton Marist’s rugby grounds, a group of women stand in a circle doing a series of stretches to warm up.

They’re wearing hoodies over the top of their rugby gear to combat the cool breeze.

They follow the lead of their captain Grace Houpapa-Barrett who has been playing for the Hamilton Marist women’s team for four years.

Some team members are on the sidelines, injured and unable to train tonight. They show up regardless to watch team-mates’ dogs, hold tackle bags and do anything else they can to contribute – anything for their team.

Like most women in New Zealand club rugby, these players aren’t paid, they are training and playing for the love of the game.

Watching on is Marist, Waikato and Black Ferns player Honey Hireme, who is running training in preparation for Marist’s match against Otorohanga on the weekend ahead.

Dubbed by the media as Honey Bill Williams because of her athleticism, achievements and adaptability in multiple codes, Hireme is a multi sport athlete who has competed at the top level of New Zealand rugby union and rugby league.

She wants the Waikato Rugby Union to do more for Waikato women’s club rugby.

“Just being able to provide more resources, specifically in terms of coaching would be good,” she says.

“At the moment you’ve got senior players like myself taking on a lot of those roles and the coaches that we are getting are probably not like your coaches that you’d get in the men’s premier grade.”

Marist competes in the Waikato women’s club rugby competition, now in its second year. Previously the Waikato region didn’t have enough teams to form their own competition, so the few teams they did have competed in Auckland.

They currently have five teams that compete and Hireme says they need better promotion to get more players involved in the game so that more teams will be able to join.

“For us in terms of recruitment, we’re just trying to grab our mates and bring them along, but the Waikato rugby Facebook page never puts up stuff about women’s rugby, yet it puts up all the musters for boys and senior men’s.”

She adds: “We have a women’s rugby Facebook page, but it has a quarter of the followers that the Waikato rugby page has.”

Hireme credited the WRU for supporting her at representative level and for helping her get into coaching.

“We are looked after once we make that level, but my heart sits with the club girls that don’t necessarily get looked after as well as what we do.

“I could stub my toe and get an operation tomorrow, these guys could break their collarbone and get an operation in six months.”

Hireme believes that the women’s game has grown in the Waikato, especially now that there are two schoolgirl divisions that provide girls with a good avenue to eventually join women’s rugby.

“The cool thing is we’ve got three pretty evenly matched teams in Hamilton and then we’re getting all the surrounding teams from the wider Waikato,” she says.

On the training ground Hireme puts her Marist team-mates into groups of four and gets them running a blow over drill on a timer.

At the end of the drill the team are exhausted. Breathing heavily and hunched over, they form a circle for the night’s final debrief.

Hireme hopes that they will have enough players for their game against Otorohanga on the weekend and won’t have to default.

On a sunny winter’s day in Otorohanga, the touchline is lined with vehicles and supporters at the Island Reserve rugby ground.

Marist captain Grace Houpapa-Barrett leads her team out to the centre of the field where they huddle up and prepare for kickoff.

She admires Hireme.

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“Honey is just the epitome of women’s rugby.

“She’s strong, she’s humble, she’s a leader. She has so many accolades under her belt, more so than what some men have and yet you never hear her bragging or anything.

“She’s an international women’s star, but she can come back to Hamilton Marist and still just train with the girls like she’s just another rugby player,” she says.

The game kicks off and both teams show early nerves – errors and penalties dominating proceedings.

Hireme’s impact can be seen on Houpapa-Barrett, she leads from the front throughout, is always the first to put her hand up for a run and is constantly talking to her team.

She speaks like a rugby captain should. She’s loud, clear and confident. When she speaks, her team listens. When she acts, they follow.

Houpapa-Barrett got into rugby at Ngakonui Valley School in the heart of the King Country, Taumarunui.

“Some of my mates like Harrison Levien and Liam Rehu, they just said get the ball and run that way and that’s pretty much how I started,” she says.

She left Taumarunui after year nine to move to Hamilton where she attended Sacred Heart Girls’ College.

“Country kid moving to the city, I was too shy to trial for basketball, so I went to rugby because I’d had a bit of a go when I was little and there weren’t many people signing up for it.”

She found success fast. In her second year regularly playing rugby, Houpapa-Barrett made the Waikato under 18 secondary schools team and remained in it until her school days were over.

Then things changed.

“From school it was straight into open women’s and that was a bit scary,” she says.

She played for Varsity. They were the only women’s team going in the Waikato region at the time, so they played in the Auckland women’s club competition.

“Playing up there was hard, man, it was tough going from schoolgirls to women’s, there’s a huge step up between the two of them.”

She believes that there’s still a lot that could be done for the state of women’s rugby in the Waikato.

“It’s still pretty poor to be honest, there’s a lot of growth that needs to happen.”

There needs to be more emphasis put on getting girls aware of the sport and giving them knowledge of the game – and that starts in the schools.

“The secondary schools comp needs to be going strong because that funnels into women’s rugby, a lot of the time we struggle with [finding] new blood and the commitment to that area needs to be better,” Houpapa-Barrett says.

She would like to see the Waikato competition get as good as the Auckland one.

“When we used to go up there with Varsity we’d get pumped, but it was a learning curve and when you come back here you can tell the difference.”

The majority of the teams in Auckland are switched on and professional when it comes to going about their work.

“They’re the best teams in New Zealand and the competition is real even, down here in the Waikato you either get thrashed 80-0 or you do the thrashing – the playing fields aren’t even.”

Houpapa-Barrett says there’s a huge experience gap between players and teams in the Waikato.

“You’ve got beginner teams with girls who have never played before, then you’ve got teams like Marist in their fourth season with girls who have played six or seven years.”

Their experience, and their captain’s, shows in the Otorohanga game.  Houpapa-Barrett puts her head down and charges. Her grey headgear is a blur as she crashes through defenders on her way to the try line.

She comes out charging again in the second half and scores another try. It is much in the same mould as the first one – there’s no substitute for running hard and fast.

At the end of the game, the scores have blown out. Marist have crushed Otorohanga 67-10. Both teams come together in a circle at the end to cheer for each other, the ref and their supporters.

For Houpapa-Barrett the best thing about playing rugby in the Waikato is “hands down playing with Marist, with the girls”.

She likes not having to travel to Auckland for games any more.

“Having a comp in the Waikato means you can give back to your club, you can play home games at the club and be back in time to watch the boys play. Not travelling and playing back at home with the girls is just an awesome feeling.”

This year Houpapa-Barrett is looking to make the Waikato women’s Farah Palmer Cup team again, after taking a break from representative rugby last year.

Her long term goal is the same as usual.

“When I first started, I really wanted to play for the Black Ferns and that is still the goal to this day.”

It takes a small army to manage Fieldays traffic each year as upwards of 130,000 visitors drive in and out of the Mystery Creek venue over four days.

Traffic Management NZ has been in business for 17 years and for 16 of them they have been ensuring that all Fieldays traffic arrives at Mystery Creek safely.

When they started out, TMNZ had about 16 staff working for them, but today 40 of their 85 Hamilton-based staff are directing traffic to the Southern Hemisphere’s largest agricultural event.

General Manager David Bird said that one of the reasons for the increase in staff is due to fatigue management.

“The laws around work hours have changed and we can’t work more than what the log book is saying,” Bird said.

TMNZ General Manager David Bird has 40 staff members working Fieldays. Photo: Jesse King

“We can’t do any more of those long hours that we used to in the old days, so now we have quite a strict fatigue policy that we try and follow very hard.”

Bird has previously covered the event as a lead site traffic management supervisor and says that Fieldays is one of the biggest events TMNZ is involved in.

“We’ve been involved in other big events like triathlons and the V8’s of course, but Fieldays is a rather large event and it has a lot of people attending it,” he said.

Bird said the TMNZ team was made up of traffic controllers, STMS’s, events specialists and the branch manager.

“We put together a team, a little army of our traffic management guys to go out there and establish and install everything to ensure it all works and runs smoothly,” he said.

He said that one of the bigger challenges his team faces is giving motorists clear directions, because if they don’t, sometimes they’ll go the wrong way.

“In saying that, some motorists are just impatient,” Bird said.

“People don’t like being stuck in traffic jams, so they feel that maybe we’re there just to make their life hell, but we’re not, we’re there to try and help them get through.”

The most common incident Bird has some across is people getting stuck.

“That’s really the challenge, moving cars that get stuck so it doesn’t clog the rest of the traffic flow up, but generally around Fieldays most people seem to move on.”

Bird said that Fieldays running a free shuttle to and from the event for ticket purchasers was “a good idea”.

“They should do more of it through the city and other big cities,” he said.

“More people using the park and rides is a good thing, but we’re New Zealanders, we like to be able to drive right up and park at the gate.”

Company director Dean Kebbell says Fieldays management have spent a lot of time and resources on making sure they’ve done everything possible to make it easier for their visitors to get there.

“These days all the roads have sand on them and they’re well compacted,” Kebbell said.

“In the old days you’d be dragging cars out with tractors and all sorts.”

Kebbell knows a bit about the old days, he helped to make new plans for managing traffic at Fieldays when TMNZ were brought on board so many years ago.

TMNZ company director Dean Kebbell has had some crazy experiences at Fieldays. Photo: Jesse King

“I suppose the number of people attending and a few changes to legislation and law regarding health and safety meant that they had an incident where they had a massive delay one year,” he said.

“So they had to sit back and say ‘crikey we need to deal with this.’ So that’s when they got us involved.”

He said it was a difficult task initially, walking into the situation cold and having to find out a lot of information in a short time.

He had meetings with police and Fieldays organisers to find out where peak traffic was coming from, what time it was peaking and where everybody was parking.

Another person involved was Leo Tooman who was the senior roading inspector at the time.

“He had a lot to do with it, him and I basically put together the very first plan and ran it for the first year and then tweaked it from there,” Kebbell said.

He said it hadn’t been hard to adapt to the event as it has grown, they just evolved with it by adding staff to the right areas and changing the set up of some of them.

One of those changes was putting signs up near Taupiri to split the traffic coming down state highway 3.

Another change was when a new roundabout was constructed south of Hamilton, leading to the city and the airport – it required TMNZ to look at managing that traffic a different way.

“Beforehand there were traffic islands and we just used to run the stop/go,” he said.

“The big thing for us is keeping the wheels turning, motorists get upset when they stop – even if they’re just crawling along they don’t mind too much because at least they can see they’re getting somewhere.”

In his time managing Fieldays traffic, Kebbell didn’t witness any serious accidents or road rage.

“Because it’s been going for so many years, road rage actually isn’t bad, people just expect it,” Kebbell said.

“People know that when you go to Fieldays you’re going to be sitting in a cue for a wee bit.”

But that’s not to say he hasn’t experienced some unusual situations in his time.

“We’ve had a bomb scare one year in the car park and had to helicopter in a bomb disposal squad from Rotorua,” Kebbell said

“The helicopter landed and blew someone’s cake up. It was cake in a tin or lunch in a tin that had fallen out of the car.”

His craziest experience at the event was when a visitor went into labour just as she was leaving.

“As soon as he heard, Leo informed myself that we needed to get her to the hospital, so we just used the boys to control the traffic and opened up a clear lane,” he said.

“Leo chucked her in his control car and they had a clear lane right out of the traffic.”

Kebbell said traffic around Fieldays was improving every year and that the only other thing that could be done to alleviate congestion would be to change the roading infrastructure.

“However, you can’t spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars creating a roading network that’s all geared around four days a year,” he said.

“There are other areas that the money needs to be spent.”