Each season a new group of female rugby players make their domestic women’s rugby competition Farah Palmer Cup debuts.

This season in Wellington there are five schoolgirls who are part of the Wellington Pride squad for the first time and hoping to secure bright futures in the game.

There are two year 12 students in the 2025 Pride group, Fono Bason (St Mary’s College) and Brooke Jones (Scots College), and three year 13 players, Emerald Tuhiwai-Polson (St Mary’s), Keiana Roffey (Wellington Girls’ College) and Baylee Meroiti (Tawa College).

Fullback Emerald was recently in the St Mary’s team that contested the Hurricanes schoolgirls final for the Rex Kerr Cup against Palmerston North’s Manukura, who went on to defend their national title in the Top 4 tournament over Winter Tournament Week.

Her school teammate and flanker Fono is the younger sister of rugby playing brothers Vernon and Mosese and sister Taufa.

College Sport Wellington caught up with Keiana and Baylee, who have both been part of all the Pride’s FPC match-day squads so far this season.

Keiana is a prop/hooker and Baylee is a wing, and both have been selected from non-traditional girls rugby schools in Wellington – WGC plays in College Sport Wellington’s Premier 2 competition while Tawa College doesn’t have a girls rugby team this year.

Baylee featured in a story on CSW over a year ago – but in a different sport.
 

📷 Chainsaw Photos

She was then a leading player and midcourter in Tawa College’s netball team that won the CSW one-day tournament in May 2024 (that tournament has subsequently been moved to later in the winter) and that spectacularly lost 35-37 in extra time to St Mary’s in the RSSL Division 1 final in August after it was 35-35 at the end of regular time.

She was also in the Aotearoa Māori Netball Secondary Schools team last year, as well as playing cricket for her school (which currently has four former players in the White Ferns).

Earlier this year she took up rugby, a sport she last played in intermediate school when as a member of the Norths junior club’s Bloodhounds team.

“I didn’t play for long back then, I broke my collar bone, so this year has been my first proper season playing rugby,” she said.

Baylee joined the Norths senior women’s team at the start of 2025 and was in their squad all season all the way to the Division 1 Tia Paasi Memorial Cup final against winners Petone.

“I was playing halfback throughout the season for Norths. Initially this year I was at fullback before moving into halfback where I had played in those junior days.”

“I’m very grateful that I have made the Pride team in my first proper season. I am loving it; it is a different environment compared to netball.”

“Coming into the Pride squad, I’ve been supported by great coaches and teammates who have been so welcoming and kind in helping me learn and improve.”

Baylee still played netball this winter. In April she played Māori representative netball for Ikaroa Ki Te Tonga in the annual Aotearoa Māori tournament that was hosted in Wellington at Aku Tangi and she then played for the Norths netball club in the Kapi Mana association competitions on Wednesday nights.

Baylee made her starting debut for the Pride on the wing against Otago at home at Porirua Park. She scored her debut try against North Harbour.

In contrast Keiana Roffey has been playing rugby since she was four, as she explained:

“I grew up in Canterbury in a small town called Little River and played for the Banks Peninsula Rugby Football Club, where I started playing Rippa.

“The reason I started playing at that time was probably the most front row reason ever. I got jealous of the after-match food at my brother’s rugby games and netball didn’t have that, so I started playing rugby!

“I kept playing for that reason but then I fell in love with the game and have mostly been playing ever since.”

Keiana moved to Wellington when she was 14 but had to be 16 to play club rugby in the capital, so she joined Pōneke and trained with them for two seasons until she became eligible to play for them in 2023.

She still couldn’t play in the front row until she was 18. “I was still 17 throughout this club rugby season so I was still playing as a loose forward this year until recently.”

She had played in the front row when she was younger in Canterbury and had some club and Wellington high performance coaches bring her up to speed on the dark arts of hooker and prop before being selected for the Pride in those positions.

It paid off spectacularly for her in the team’s last home match against the Taranaki Whio two weeks ago when she came on in the second half to replace captain and starting hooker Vailani Vaka and scored a second-half hat-trick.

Keiana was happy with that but praised her teammates around her. “Saying ‘hat-trick’ sounds really nice, but if you look at them they are all part of big efforts by the forward pack, such as two of them being off mauls, but it was great to contribute to the win.”

In some trivia, this hat-trick had local statisticians searching to find out if this was the only instance of a player coming off the bench and scoring a hat-trick for Wellington Pride or Lions teams. The findings were inconclusive as to whether she made history with this achievement.

Keiana has embraced the challenge of stepping up from club rugby to provincial rugby. “It is more the lift in intensity that is the big difference, you have to be switched on with everything and at all times.”

Following that 76-0 win over Taranaki, last weekend the Pride travelled to Kaikohe, about an hour north of Whangarei, and met a 13-22 defeat to home side the Northland Kauri.

Both Keiana and Baylee came off the bench in the second half in that match. Their next game is a replay against the same opposition in this coming weekend’s semi-final in Whangarei.

Ahead of that, Keiana has one more match to play for her Wellington Girls’ team this Wednesday night, against Hutt Valley High School in the CSW Division 2 decider.

Both players are unsure what they will be doing next year when they leave school, but both agree that they want to stick with rugby and see where it takes them.

Story courtesy of College Sport Media.
Article added: Wednesday 10 September 2025