Rob Wright is the most successful assistant coach in ANZ Premiership history. In six seasons with the Mystics, he’s helped steer the franchise to a record four national titles.
Now he’s fighting for the competition he believes New Zealand can’t afford to lose.
No victory has meant more to him than the latest – last weekend’s 10-goal grand final victory over the Steel, sitting alongside head coach Tia Winikerei.
“Of all the four championships we’ve won, this is the most special for me. I felt we had to coach better this season to find a way through,” Wright, 58, says.
The Australian now calls Auckland home, spending all but three months of the year here. The rest of the time he’s in the Caribbean helping Jamaica’s Sunshine Girls.
He lives in a granny flat in Onehunga. Bill, the 90-year-old homeowner upstairs, had never watched a netball match before Wright moved in, in 2021. “Now he never misses a Mystics game and gives me advice on how the team could do better,” his tenant says.
Wright has also found a home at the Mystics. “Everyone knows I’m a bit odd,” he says, though others use the word ‘quirky’. “But at the Mystics, people just accept you for who you are. We want our people to be themselves, then the magic happens.”
He’s become deeply invested in New Zealand netball. Coming here, he says, was the best decision he’s ever made. That’s why he’s speaking out now, urging Netball New Zealand to salvage the national domestic competition before it ceases to exist.
On Saturday night at a heaving Trusts Stadium, there was an underlying dread this could be the end of an era. After the game, and in the days since, players and coaches have voiced fears there may not be a professional league next season – left in the dark by Netball New Zealand. Without a broadcast deal for 2027, the sports body has yet to decide the competition’s future.
Wright is shocked by the lack of communication from netball’s leadership and worries the competition will become entirely amateur or simply collapse – leaving players and coaches, including himself, jobless.
“I’d be shattered. Absolutely shattered,” he says. “Selfishly for myself, but also for all the players, all the people working in the six franchises. People have mortgages to pay and need to put food on the table. Life is hard enough right now.
“I’d have to look overseas because I want to continue coaching. I’ve done it fulltime since 2008 and I want to do what I love, helping people to be better.
“But the Mystics are like family to me. The players I’ve worked with over the last six seasons have been phenomenal. I feel like this is home.”
A push for private ownership
Wright has ideas on how the premiership could be transformed – from a different competition structure (returning to three rounds, and a top four finals series) to new owners.
“It’s a bit controversial, but I think we need private ownership. I’d love to see someone come in and take over the league and take it to the stratosphere,” he says.
“Some people might think that’s a disaster. But we’ve got to do something with these magnificent athletes, to take the next step in netball’s growth.
“For three years in a row we keep asking, ‘What’s the future hold?’ And this year things feel even less certain. We cannot allow this game to wither and die – especially with a World Cup next year.”
Wright first coached the Mystics through a laptop screen, stuck in Australia during New Zealand’s 2021 Covid lockdown. The then head coach, Helene Wilson, brought him in after he lost his job as head coach of the Collingwood Magpies, who finished bottom of the 2020 Suncorp Super Netball season.
He arrived with an intriguing resume, as the first male coach in the trans-Tasman ANZ Championship, taking the NSW Swifts to the grand finals in 2015 and 2016.
“I loved coming here during the ANZ Championships and the New Zealand teams really interested me – especially the Mystics, who I always thought had underperformed,” he says.
“Helene was gutsy enough to take me on when she didn’t know me from a bar of soap, and we got on like a house on fire. It’s honestly been the best thing I’ve done.”
The detailed eye of a world-class assistant
Sulu Fitzpatrick, a former Mystics captain who played three seasons under Wright, sensed something special about him from their first meeting. “He was the right mix of quirky, strange and loveable,” she says.
“What most people don’t see in Rob is how in-depth his analysis of the game is – right down to the way your foot is placed in the first step of your movement, or the little intricacies of every player.
“Even though he’s so detailed, his ability to refine his messaging to be really simple, clear and to the point has been integral to the development of young defenders like Carys Stythe and Catherine Hall, and older ones like Phoenix Karaka, Michaela Sokolich-Beatson and myself. He’s world class.”
Wright and Winikerei have worked together since 2021 (she was the Mystics apprentice coach), and have grown into a tight coaching unit. During a game, he takes care of the defence, while she looks after the attack.
“Neither of us want to talk a lot because we’re obviously into the game, but we’ll communicate things we’re seeing. I might say, ‘We’re not letting the ball go, we could change this a little bit’,” Wright says.
“There were times in the grand final where we thought we needed to make a change, but all of a sudden, they’d get themselves good again and we’d go, ‘Nah we need to stick with what we’re doing’.” The Mystics stuck with their starting seven throughout the 60 minutes.
At halftime, the two coaches will stay on the sideline bench for a few minutes after the team heads to the locker room to discuss what they’ll tell the players. “It also allows the players to have time together, to chat through things themselves. They have as much – or more – input than we do,” he says.
He has huge respect for Winikerei, a former police detective. “During halftime in the grand final Tia told the team she expected the Steel defence to change, which they did. So, in the first half Filda [Vui] did most of our scoring, then in the second half, Maia [Wilson] took over. That was real cool,” he says.
“In four years as head coach, Tia’s made four grand finals and won three of them. We keep talking about how no one wants us to win because we say we’re both ‘Neville Nobodies’ – we’re not ex-Silver Ferns, we’re not famous. But the people who come to our games support us and care.”
Wright is comfortable being Winikerei’s wingman, taking more reward from being an assistant coach these days. “My work on the floor is where I think I’m best. It’s the part I absolutely love,” he says.
“As a head coach, there’s 80 percent more stuff you have to do besides the actual coaching bit. That 20 percent is why I get up every day to try to make people better.”
That doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about becoming a head coach again.
“I’m really happy where I’m at, but if the opportunity came up, it would have to be the right environment with the right people, because the people are everything,” he says. “That’s the beauty of what we have at the Mystics – the organisation looks after its people. Tia’s really big on that, if you take care of your people, you can do anything.”
That ethos appears to have rubbed off on the players, who headed north after the final for a few days of R&R together.
“One of their real strengths is they’re really happy for others in the team to shine. They’re happy for other people to have success, and that’s powerful,” Wright says.
Leaping over hurdles
The 2026 season started on the wrong foot for a Mystics side determined to erase memories of their grand final loss to the Tactix the previous season. Experienced midcourters Taylor Earle and Katie Te Ao were sidelined by leg injuries before the competition started, then midway through Catherine Hall – the stand-out defender of the league – jammed her foot against the goalpost and needed surgery.
That gave the coaching staff a new challenge. “Our defence is based on our entire back four, so when Taylor and Katie were out, it showed how important they are to our team,” says Wright. “We had to keep finding ways to get better, a little bit better than our opposition.”
He’d already decided before the season to make two improvements to the way he communicated with his players. The first was to make the training activities he devised more specific to the game; the second to make his coaching “more actionable and seeable”.
“I tried to be more succinct – so everything I wanted to get across, the player should be able to see it as a picture in their mind, making it easier to do,” says Wright, who reckons he succeeded.
“It’s quite weird, my favourite part of coaching is actually the training sessions not the game – so to see the stuff we’ve done in training play out in a game is magical for me.”
Wright is about to head to England and join the Jamaican team ahead of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. He’s been their specialist defensive coach since 2022.
“I always wanted to get into international netball and this has allowed me to do that for a few months of the year, then coach day in, day out in a league. I haven’t really wanted to do anything else,” he says.
“But now I’m worried, not knowing what 2027 holds for any of us. I’d love to stay here, but it actually may not be possible.”
Says Fitzpatrick, who’s now on the Mystics board: “We all love him and hope he is in New Zealand for a long time to come.”
Eyeing a trans-Tasman exit strategy
The Mystics confirmed last week they had launched a bid in February to enter a team in the 2028 expansion of Super Netball. They’re still waiting to hear the outcome from Netball Australia.
Before coming to New Zealand, Wright spent most of his life on the sidelines of netball courts in Australia – first watching his mum and sisters, then taking up coaching after a near-fatal accident as a teen, hit by a car while riding his bike, ended his own athletic ambitions.
Since the ANZ Championship was dissolved in 2016, the Aussies have created the world’s strongest franchise competition.
Wright believes entry into the SSN would expand the popularity of the Mystics, as it has with the Breakers, the Warriors, the Phoenix and Auckland FC in their respective Australian leagues. “We would all of a sudden become New Zealand’s team,” he says.
“The salary caps over there are obviously much bigger than ours and the trans-Tasman connection could open up new doors for commercial partners. It would also open up pathways for young players, who could imagine themselves playing in the world’s best competition, and be a stepping stone for players to become fulltime athletes.”
The Mystics would need private investment to be able to take a team across the Tasman. And it also begs the question: would Australia want a New Zealand team in their league?
“They’ve never made it a secret that they wanted SSN to become the best domestic competition in the world,” Wright says. “Even though there were five current Silver Ferns playing there this year, having a New Zealand team would make it the ultimate global competition. It expands their uptake, audience and commercial partners over there as well. Then it will truly rival the WNBA.
“Netball has been my entire life. I want to see a day when our netballers are earning a genuine fulltime wage from the game. It’s still the biggest female sport in our country, so we’ve got to continue to sell our wonderful sport and make it bigger and better. We can’t let this comp fall over.”
