Healthy drinking habits, happy life.
Above: Tony Hargood, CEO of Wairarapa Bush Rugby, and Joe Harwood, Coach of Wairarapa-Bush Heartland team.
In February 2020 the ‘What About You?’ campaign, aimed at rugby clubs and supporters, was launched at a special screening of the movie, ‘The Ground We Won’, which followed a rugby club’s fortunes over one season of rugby.
“The feedback and support since then had been amazing”, said Tony Hargood CEO of Wairarapa Bush Rugby Union, “and we will kick off the campaign for the rugby season, on the 4th of July at grounds around the Wairarapa”.
The film showed how the social drinking habits around rugby culture, could lead to harmful behaviour.
Excess drinking, is well-known as a contributing factor in mental health problems, family violence, marriage breakdowns, illegal behaviour and suicide in some cases.
Over 150,000 kiwis play rugby, coach and referee, and hundreds of thousands more are volunteers, parents and fans.
With connections like this Rugby is in a unique position to contribute to the conversation around drinking, mental health and wellbeing.
As Tony said, “It’s about how we’re drinking and our club and team attitudes to alcohol.
We want to foster a club culture where people can enjoy a drink after the game but, without drinking to excess, or feeling pressured to drink, or excluded if they choose not to”.
Wairarapa Bush Rugby’s new code of conduct aims to set clear expectations about alcohol use and behaviour in general in the rugby clubs in their network.
It is designed to support clubs to be safe, supportive and successful environments for the teams, their players, administrators and wider communities, and includes aspects such as fair play, responsible sideline behaviour, along with guidelines for alcohol use.
Kath Tomlinson, Senior Health Advisor from Tū Ora Compass Health who is supporting WBRU with the campaign said, “the campaign isn’t preaching to people about not drinking – it’s focused on encouraging people to make the right choice by asking – what about you? and what would you do? when it comes to attitudes to alcohol and drinking behaviour”.
She added that through the campaign they also hoped to make it easier for people having concerns about their own alcohol use or that of friends or family members, to feel that they could ask for help.
“We have some fantastic alcohol and drug support services in the Wairarapa, but not everyone’s aware of what’s available and how to access it.
The campaign team have developed discreet booklets that provide details of how to access these and national support services along with some tips for staying on track”.
Joe Harwood Wairarapa Bush Heartland’s Coach is also a campaign advocate. He says “Coaches are in a position where they often notice if someone’s not feeling great or are struggling. So it’s helpful to have a campaign that enables us to link people to support services they may need. It’s been great over the years to see so many high-profile players from our sport stand up and share their challenges with mental health and alcohol issues in the hope of highlighting that anyone can be affected, and to encourage people to seek help.
“As a point of social contact in our communities, rugby clubs do have a role to play in encouraging people to seek help, and alcohol issues are often a symptom of wider personal challenges that people are going through.
There’s increasing awareness of the mental health issues that are widespread in our communities and that affect people across different age groups, social class levels and ethnicities.
Depression and anxiety aren’t reflective of any one type of person – we’re all vulnerable to these conditions that can have such a huge impact on individuals and the people around them.
We want our rugby clubs to be places where we’d want to bring our families and where there is positive role-modelling about alcohol use for our kids and the future players coming through.”
Please feel free to contact Tony on 027 473 8367 or via email tony@waibush.co.nz to discuss this campaign
Lisa Urbani
Lisa.urbani@age.co.nz
