By Dale Budge
A bunch of Year 7 students from Bader Intermediate have emulated the iconic Jamaican bobsled team that inspired the movie Cool Runnings and won the trip of a lifetime to attend the NFL’s Pro Bowl.
In a truly unique feel-good story, the little-known school from South Auckland cobbled together a flag football team comprised of rugby, league and basketball players, entered a national tournament, won their way to the title and have now earned the right to represent New Zealand at an international tournament in the United States early next year.
“It was just from an email, and I just follow through with it, went to the coaching day with a few other schools and then I just followed through with the emails again and we ended up getting selected to go down to Wellington with six other Auckland schools to verse six other Wellington schools,” Bader Intermediate teach Chrystal Otunuku told Counties Sports Hub.
“And then here we are – we just put together a team of 10 students, trained them up and it’s quite surreal what’s happened.”
The team went through an NFL-led coaching day and decided they wanted to have a crack at it, so they put a program together to learn the game before last week’s tournament.
The NFL covered the costs of getting the team to Wellington for the national tournament.
“We played five games or four round games and then we made it to the semis and that’s when I was just like, oh, I don’t know, this opposing team has an ex-NFL coach that was in America for a bit,” Otunuku explained.
“Then the finals came, and we were against Takapuna, and it was 16-all at half-time. And then it pretty much went down to the last two minutes, and we were up by two and then we had the possession of the ball, and we got a touchdown and secured it. I don’t even think it feels real now.”
The win means the team gets an all-expenses paid invite to a tournament in Florida at the end of January and they will also get to attend the NFL Pro Bowl – the all-star game with all of the biggest names in the sport.
“We’ve got to contact parents now. It’s passports – we’ve got students here that haven’t even gone out of Auckland. We’ve got students who are asking us if they need to change their money to Wellington money. So, this is huge.”
Fellow Bader Intermediate teach Nick Leger reached out to Counties Sports Hub with the story and compared the achievement to the now iconic story of Jamaican sprinters that formed a bobsled team and won the right to compete at the 1988 Winter Olympics, which inspired the movie Cool Runnings.
Otunuku can see the similarities.
“It does have similarities – when he said that I was like, do you know what this is? This is the New Zealand version of that story. It is, it is a bunch of students that have just come together like quite a now a tight-knit family that are going forward now as Team New Zealand.”
The students will get a day to look around Orlando before two days of pool play and finals.
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