When Renee Holmes first started eyeing up the prospect of playing rugby, there was one obvious hurdle.
In her hometown of Gisborne, there was no 15s team for her to join.
This wasn’t long ago – the 22-year-old fullback and the Black Ferns’ best goalkicker (Wayne Smith’s words, not ours) only picked up the sport in her final years of high school.
It was her dad Laurie who found the solution.
A club in Hastings she could play at, a three and a half hour drive away.
“He just said if you want to commit, we could do it,” Holmes tells 1News from the team hotel as she prepares to start in the World Cup final.
There’s an easy pun there.
Dad as the driving force.
But it’s true.
Holmes’s parents separated when she was young, and now she and her dad are inseparable.
He drove her every week to training in Hastings, a seven-hour round trip in all that only cemented their bond.
“We had no speaker in our car, no music in our car, we'd literally yarn the whole way there and then I’d sleep on the way back,” Holmes says.
She hears him in the crowd no matter how big it is – he’s also at every game, regardless of level, or where he has to travel.
There’s only one exception: Last year’s end of year tour, which he couldn’t travel to due to Covid. It’s where Holmes made her Black Ferns debut.
“You know we aren’t very wealthy at all, but I know he'd sell an arm and a leg to try and get there to be there, and he was actually… I think it broke him a bit [that he wasn’t].
“He’s been with me every step of the way, and he’s the reason why I get to pull on the black jersey every week, he’s the one that believed in me.”
She tries not to cry thinking about it, but times like this often bring on reflections, and they in turn can bring on tears.
After all, she had originally been aiming to play the 2025 World Cup, not this one.
And while she’s always been a proficient goalkicker, dad was the one who told her it’d be the reason why she’d be starting in the World Cup.
“When I called him to say I was starting in the semi-final at home it really hit…
“Just to know all those miles on the road and all those nights where we might’ve just been having noodles for dinner, it was all for that moment and moments like this.”
She’s sure she’ll be ready for the moment come the final against England tonight as well.
After all, New Zealanders don’t need reminding of the importance of a kick in a World Cup final on Eden Park.
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