At the time of the announcement, Minister Mallard said the scholarship fund would offer support to future sporting stars so they can reach their potential in sport while still gaining a solid education to fall back on.
A quarter of a century later, the Prime Minister’s Scholarship programme, unique to New Zealand, continues to assist high performance athletes with their education goals. And in the intervening years, coaches, officials and support staff have been added to the high performance group eligible for support.
To mark the milestone over the next few months, in a new series HPSNZ Update will talk with a range of high performance athletes, from 2000 to 2025, to hear their PM’s Scholarship experience and the role it played in shaping life after sport for them.
But first, a little history of the programme.
1999 saw the introduction of the New Zealand Academy of Sport, charged with responsibility for high performance sport. With three regional centres – north, central and south – NZAS took over managing some 1500 elite athletes who were funded and supported under a ‘card’ system.
As part of its establishment, the New Zealand Academy of Sport franchised the Athlete Career and Education (ACE) programme from the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), led by Robyn Cockburn.
Current AUT Deputy Head of School – Sport and Recreation Gaye Bryham takes up the story.
“In 1999, I was seconded to work alongside Karin Adelinger-Smith (currently Sport NZ National Partnership Manager) and Audry McLaren (currently Head of Funding, Foundation North), along with others, to tender for NZAS North. There were strong links to AUT and to the then Millennium Institute of Sport (MISH), now AUT Millennium, as the Government recognised that, as a country, we could not afford to build our own high performance facilities,” says Gaye.
The successful tender resulted in what Gaye and her colleagues describe as a frantic six-month period from the beginning of 2000 up to Minister Mallard’s announcement of the scholarship programme in June 2000.
“If that set up phase was frantic then the next six months were crazy. We had to establish systems and procedures to get the PM’s Scholarship programme set up in time for the start of the 2001 tertiary academic year,” says Gaye.
Not only was it a start-up system, the group had to also advise and educate all carded athletes of the programme, develop relationships with tertiary institutions who would be accepting athlete enrolments through the scholarships, develop eligibility and application processes and finally advise athletes whether they were successful or not.
Gaye says what stands out to her from the early days is that the genesis of the idea for the scholarships and their introduction was driven at a political level.
“There was clear recognition that New Zealanders are passionate about sport and value education. Bringing these two together as part of the sport culture in New Zealand was important to the positioning of the scholarships,” says Gaye. “Minister Mallard was not only the sport minister at the time, he was also the Minister of Education.
“And it continues to be an extremely important, bi-partisan political initiative with Ministers and Prime Ministers over the past 25 years being extremely supportive of the programme.”
