The SiS Journal - May '24
Hey Sis!
Welcome to the May edition of The SiS Journal.
This will be our last TSJ for a little while as our editor takes time out to welcome her first pēpi into the world 👶🏼 Our sister publication, The SiS Report, will continue as normal, bringing you the latest women’s sports news, events, fashion and entertainment each month. We’ll resume regular programming of TSJ as soon as possible, but for now enjoy a couple of epic reads about Kiwi wāhine killing it in sport.
This month’s Big Sis is McKenna Dale, our very own American-born Tall Fern who made her debut in the black singlet during the FIBA Olympic Qualifiers in Xi’an, China earlier this year. The former college basketball star was one of several key players during that fateful tour to develop an injury and she has spent the past few months rehabilitating a stress fracture in her leg. McKenna was a stand-out performer for the Whai in last season’s Tauihi Basketball Aotearoa league after making the move to Tauranga from her home in Storrs, Connecticut 🇺🇸
Our Little Sis is BMX phenom Maddy Newcombe, 12, who has just wrapped up her second UCI BMX World Championships this month representing New Zealand all the way over in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The Rotorua teen has been riding since she was just six-years-old and has already amassed an impressive trophy collection, including coming first in the 2023 Oceania BMX Championships, being ranked number one in New Zealand for her age group and being selected as one of five girls to compete in the Mighty 11 trans-Tasman BMX competition 🚴🏼♀️
The SiS Journal is a collection of longer form reads featuring our monthly Little Sis and Big Sis segments on inspiring young kōtiro (girls) and wāhine (women) in sport 🤩
We’ve made a decision to keep The SiS Journal free to all of our subscribers along with our sister publication The SiS Report. If you like what you see and you’re keen for us to keep the content coming we ask that you consider becoming a paid subscriber for as little as $7.50 a month. Think of it as a monthly koha for our mahi 🎁
Love your SiS (Sisters in Sport) x
McKenna Dale
Lately, basketballer McKenna Dale has been spending more time in the pool than on the hard wood of a basketball court as she recovers from injury. But oddly enough it’s a familiar place for her. In fact, the six-foot tall athlete was once a state champion swimmer. Towards the end of high-school, McKenna was faced with a cross-roads like many teenage athletes, forcing her to choose between her two beloved sports. Basketball won her over in the end and it’s proved to be a fruitful choice.
The American-born Kiwi has enjoyed a successful college basketball career which saw her play Division I basketball in the NCAA and go on to pursue professional contracts here in New Zealand with the Whai in the flourishing Tauihi Basketball Aotearoa league and with the Bendigo Spirit in Australia’s WNBL. She also made her senior international debut for the Tall Ferns during the FIBA Olympic Qualifiers in Xi’an, China earlier this year which is where she suffered her latest injury – a stress fracture in her leg. It was a full circle moment for McKenna who is the second in her family to wear the silver fern, following in her Kiwi father Darren Dale’s footsteps who ran the 400m for New Zealand in the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland. It was a dream McKenna says she has held ever since discovering her dual-citizenship.
A Kiwi connection
Born in Arizona, McKenna then moved interstate with her family to Storrs, Connecticut on the East Coast of the United States when she was a youngster and remained there until starting her college career. Her father Darren is an expat Kiwi and her mother Kathleen was an American former college basketballer. It’s no surprise then that all three of the Dale siblings have gone on to become talented athletes. One of four kids, McKenna chose to follow her mother onto the basketball court, while her younger brother Hunter has followed their father into track and field, her older sister Siobhan was a State swimming champion and younger sister Kaleigh is playing Division I college soccer.
“We all played sports growing up, but we also kind of had our own sports which was nice so there wasn’t too much overlap.
“I remember going to watch my older sister. She was always my role model growing up, so I wanted to do everything she did. She started swimming before me and then a couple of years later when I was old enough I joined her. I have really great memories from that. It’s always been my second sport, so it was a little bit more fun, because there was less pressure,” says McKenna.
Living right around the corner from the University of Connecticut, the home of the UConn Huskies women’s basketball team, the most successful women's basketball program in the nation having won a record 11 NCAA Division I National Championships and a women's record four in a row from 2013 through 2016, was bound to have an impact.
“I grew up being a huge fan of UConn women’s basketball. It was an era when they really dominated everyone. Players like Breanna Stewart, Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis and Stefanie Dolson. Me and my teammates and my family would go to so many games. It was really cool to be part of a town that had such a women’s basketball powerhouse.”
The seed was planted early on of playing top level basketball, McKenna says, but it was discovering her Kiwi identity that was a turning point to consider one day playing basketball for New Zealand.
“Knowing that my Dad competed for New Zealand, he inspired me to come and play in New Zealand. That always gave me something to work towards.”
At the age of 10, McKenna got the chance to connect with her Kiwi heritage when the family upped sticks and moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch for two years.
“Dad grew up in Christchurch and he got offered a job out there so he moved everyone down. We got a place near family and it was something new and exciting. It was a part of the world we’d heard about, but had never seen before so it was a cool opportunity.”
It would be 11 years later that McKenna would return to New Zealand, but not before navigating the famed college basketball system back home in the States.
Scouted to play college ball
McKenna’s college prospects came from her time spent playing in AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) tournaments across the country which were prime scouting territory for college basketball recruiters. AAU tournaments run independently of high school basketball and are an added opportunity for talented players to get exposure.
“College coaches watch the games. If they like what they see then they’ll go through your coach or send you a message,” McKenna explains.
Navigating approaches from recruiters at such a young age, McKenna says she relied heavily on her parents, her AAU coach and her high school coach for advice.
With a strong academic background, McKenna says she was lucky to have the freedom to choose a college that would tick both boxes to fulfil her academic and basketball ambitions.
In 2017 McKenna enrolled in the prestigious Ivy-league college Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island where she remained until 2021 when she graduated with a degree in Business, Entrepreneurship, and Organisations. While she had no trouble with her academic achievements, McKenna’s time with the Brown Bears was riddled with interruptions. First by injury which saw her sit out the 2018 – 2019 season and then by COVID-19 which resulted in the 2020 – 2021 season being cancelled. Feeling as though she had unfinished business with her college basketball career, McKenna sought a transfer to the University of Virginia.
“There’s a rule in the Ivy League that you can’t play as a grad student, so I knew I had to transfer if I wanted to keep playing. So I put my name in the transfer portal and Virginia was one of the schools that reached out to me.”
The chance to play in Division I of the NCAA league for the Virginia Cavaliers was a huge draw card, McKenna says.
“It was definitely a step-up in terms of competition level, so I think I took a little bit of time to adjust, but it was nice that I’d already had four years of being a college athlete so the transition with school was relatively simple.”
McKenna spent two seasons with the Cavaliers, appearing in every game from 2021 – 2023 and finishing her college career with 677 points.
Witnessing first-hand the recent success of players like Caitlin Clark, regarded as one of the greatest collegiate players of all time and the NCAA Division I all-time leading scorer, and the overall growth in NCAA women’s basketball is hugely gratifying, McKenna says.
The 2024 NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Tournament attracted 18.7 million viewers across ESPN and ABC and the championship finale between South Carolina and Iowa saw an 89% increase in viewership from the previous year, surpassing the men’s viewership for the first time ever.
“You talk to any women’s basketball player and they’ll say, ‘it’s about time women’s basketball is getting the respect it deserves’. It’s amazing to see how many people are excited about it and how many people are getting into it that weren’t before. It makes me really happy because I know how hard these girls work.”
She says it’s hard to fathom the advancements in just three short years since Oregon’s Sedona Prince famously called out the NCAA for inequalities between the men’s and women’s facilities in a video that went viral on TikTok.
“It makes me so happy to see that changes are being made and I’m hoping that it’s only going to continue in the future.”
The growth is even more mind-blowing for McKenna’s mum Kathleen who played college basketball in an era when inequalities were the norm.
“We talk about it so often. Every week she’ll call me and be like ‘Oh did you see this that’s happening?’. She’s always been super into it and basketball has been a big part of her life. I think especially for people like her who have been able to see the growth firsthand is really special.”
The Whai come calling
After a successful inaugural season in the 2022 Tauihi Basketball Aotearoa league, the Bay of Plenty based Whai went looking to add to their roster for the 2023 season and happened upon a certain American-born Kiwi who fit the bill. McKenna describes getting the call from coach Alex Stojkovic.
“After college I didn’t really have any plans. Alex from the Whai reached out to me and I made the decision to move down and play in the Tauihi league for a few months. I ended up really enjoying it.
“We did a lot of outreach in the community and went into a lot of schools to get the girls excited about basketball and tried to spread what knowledge we had on the game,” says McKenna.
While the Whai finished in fourth during that 2023 season, McKenna was a stand-out performer, winning the Tauihi Aotearoa Performance of the Year award and putting out multiple 30-point games for her side.
Reflecting on her first season in New Zealand, McKenna says she enjoyed having a taste of a unique style of play that differed from the more regimented college basketball in the States.
“It’s definitely a very different style of play. Coming from college, everything was very structured. There was really one system that everyone was made to fit into. You had very specific plays and very specific actions. In New Zealand, it’s a lot more free-flowing and there’s more freedom to explore different aspects of your game.”
It would seem she took no time at all to assimilate to the Kiwi style. In fact, she appeared in the top 10 across league assists, blocks, offensive rebounds, steals and total points. McKenna also led the league in three-pointers, scoring a whopping 47, and posting a total of 248 points across the Whai’s 13-game season.
It’s the sort of performance that gets noticed and unsurprisingly popped up on Tall Ferns head coach Guy Molloy’s radar. McKenna was selected for the FIBA Olympic Qualifiers in Xi’an, China – her first outing in black since representing the Junior Tall Ferns in 2016 at the FIBA U18 Oceania Championships.
Sadly, McKenna’s tour was cut short when she developed a stress fracture in her leg and the Tall Ferns suffered a raft of further injuries to key players which saw them fall heartbreakingly short of Olympic qualification.
“Obviously it wasn’t the most enjoyable experience, but I was so thankful to be a part of it. I’m very grateful for the opportunity, but it was tough,” she says.
The Kiwis’ Olympic dream was broken in a narrow two-point loss to Puerto Rico in the second game of the qualifying series, which saw the victors earn their ticket to Paris while the Tall Ferns missed out.
“Making it to the Olympics was a dream for so many of the girls and it just makes it difficult that it was so close, to miss out by only two points. But I guess that’s sport, it’s a game and things happen, injuries happen. It just gives the team and everyone something to work harder for and another goal to set.”
The familiar comeback road
McKenna is no stranger to injury. At 24-years-old, she has already overcome shoulder and knee surgery to continue playing the game she loves. The key to her rehabilitation, she says has been having a steadfast support network and remembering her love for the sport of basketball.
“No matter what, I’ll always have my love for the game to push me through in setting goals and having something to work towards. That’s always helped me to navigate those tough times.
“And having a really good support system in place. I was lucky enough to have great friends in college and my family to support me no matter what. Knowing that they’re there, no matter what I’m going through, I’ll always have people to rely on to get me through.”
While the physical improvements come with hard work, McKenna says the mental aspect of injury can often be the hardest to work through.
“For me the hardest thing was not feeling like myself when I came back each time and knowing that I’m probably not performing as I was used to. It’s really hard to keep that faith that you’re eventually going to get back to that level. It felt like I would never be the same player that I was, but I had people in my life that were telling me every day that I could do it and to stay positive.
“And eventually I did. You are going to get through it, I can say that for sure. It will be a difficult journey, but at the end of the day you’ll get through it. And honestly, the lessons that I learned and the level of patience that I developed was something positive that I got out of it. You learn a lot about yourself and you grow a lot.”
Speaking from her home away from home in Western Australia, McKenna says she is now focused on her recovery so she can make a speedy return to the court.
“It’s getting there. It’s just been extremely slow. I’m still not able to practice or play yet. But the recovery is coming, I’m definitely seeing improvement each week so I’m hoping to be back on the court really soon.”
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Maddy Newcombe
For 12-year-old BMX phenom Maddy Newcombe, it’s the adrenaline she says made her fall in love with the sport. The Rotorua teen has only been riding for six years, but is already travelling the world to compete and has just wrapped up her second UCI BMX World Championships this month representing New Zealand over 13,000 kilometres away in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Ranked number one in New Zealand and number two in Oceania for her age, Maddy has her sights firmly set on going global and achieving a world number one ranking in the not so distant future. And judging by her world championship results, she’s not too far off the mark.
Hooked on adrenaline
It was her dad, Maddy says who first introduced her to the sport of BMX when he spotted an open day advertised down at their local track in Waipa Valley, Rotorua.
A keen mountain biker like her dad, Maddy says she was curious to give it a go and jumped on a borrowed BMX bike for her first ride at just six-year-old.
“I remember it being pretty scary at first. I was borrowing equipment, but I just kept going down to the track and riding. And I’ve just lived at the track ever since,” she says.
It was a big shift away from her previous pursuit of ballet which she soon gave away after discovering her love of going fast, Maddy explains.
“I just loved the adrenaline. It’s exciting going really fast and when you’re riding it’s just kind of living in the moment.”
A BMX mecca
Rotorua, a region complete with beautiful native forests and a multitude of trails and tracks for adventure seekers, is the ideal training ground for an aspiring BMX rider. Even more so now that Maddy’s local Rotorua BMX Club boasts one of only two international competition standard tracks in the country.
The $1.6 million facility, named Te Papa o Te Kauri, opened in 2019 and comes complete with an 8m supercross ramp. Well-known local BMX rider Craig Pattle was influential in the track’s design and shaping which sits on land the Rotorua BMX Club leases from the Rotorua Lakes Council.
It means Maddy has the benefit of competing on home turf much of the time as one of many riders now coming through the local ranks thanks in part to the new facility.
“It’s a really good track. It’s a lot longer than most tracks and is really good to ride,” says Maddy.
Maybe I could take this further
It wasn’t until Maddy won her first North Island Championships that she first considered her long-term future in BMX. She was eight at the time and remembers the feeling of winning.
“It’s a really cool feeling, and then when they hand out trophies and stuff it’s awesome.”
Now her growing collection of trophies takes pride of place on a set of shelves in her room, she says, but she’s quickly running out of space.
With her eyes on international competition, Maddy now trains at least four times a week in between school and says she’s lucky to have the support of her club to help her take her riding to the next level.
“We’ve got heaps of riders at the moment, but there are not many girls. It’s still a boy-dominated sport. But there are heaps of people that give me tips.”
In training she likes to focus her attention on the crux point – the starting gates.
“That’s the key to winning a race. If you have a really bad gate then you have to weave through all of the other riders to get to the front. It’s probably the hardest part to get right.”
On race day she admits to getting a little bit nervous in the morning, but believes it helps her to tune into her surroundings.
“I just try not to think about anything. Before the race I usually just hang out with my friends until I have to race and then I just go for it.”
A jet-set rider
In a relatively short space of time Maddy has already travelled across the globe to ply her trade on the BMX track.
Aside from her trip to the States this year, Maddy last year made the trip to Glasgow, Scotland to compete in her first UCI BMX World Championships and also travelled to Sydney as one of five Kiwi girls selected for the Mighty 11 Junior Test in July. The Mighty 11 is a trans-Tasman competition for the best 11-year-old riders from both sides of the ditch.
Australian riders have a reputation for being amongst the best in the world, Maddy says.
“We were there for 10 days competing. The Australian riders are really good, they have really good tracks over there, more riders and more competition so they’re definitely the ones to beat.”
Just a couple of months earlier, Maddy achieved her career highlight placing first in her age group at the 2023 Oceania BMX Championships hosted on home soil at the Rotorua BMX Club.
“It was my biggest achievement to date. There were riders from all over the country and one from Australia. I think there were about nine or 10 in my category.”
The win made her dream of a world number one placing feel even closer, Maddy says, a feat her BMX role models, Australian riders Saya Sakakibara (24) and Teya Rufus (17) have already achieved.
“Saya Sakakibara has a really cool style of riding, she’s really smooth and she has sponsors like Red Bull. Teya is a really good rider as well and she’s really young but still goes out there and wins the World Cup.”
With those riders 12 and five years her senior respectively, Maddy looks to be on track for a similar path of success.
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