Irene van Dyk reckons she "hit the jackpot" when she was asked to mentor Paris Lokotui. There's certainly something special about this year-old schoolgirl from Wellington, the Silver Ferns legend says. In her final year at Queen Margaret College, Lokotui has already represented New Zealand in three different sports β basketball, netball and water polo.
She's nearing the stage where she may have to narrow it down to focus on just one sport. When you know her background, it comes as no surprise that Lokotui - who's also a top academic student and deeply involved in Maori and Polynesian culture at school - seems to handle the load with ease.
She's grown up travelling the world with her rugby playing dad, Lua Lokotui. The Tongan lock, who went to two Rugby World Cups, also played for clubs in France, England and Japan before settling down with his family in Wellington. She's picked up her dad's work ethic, too, and van Dyk sees all that experience coming through in her young mentee. They weren't exactly strangers to each other.
Van Dyk helped to coach Lokotui in the Wellington U17 netball team when they won the national title in Academically she is incredibly sound, she's very popular with her team-mates, and she's great at every sport she takes part in," van Dyk says.
And Lokotui loves being part of as many sports as she can. This year she played for the New Zealand secondary schools netball side in a four-test series with their English counterparts. She's also given volleyball, athletics, swimming, hockey and underwater hockey a go, and this year she decided to try sevens rugby too though she's promising to keep that to a bit of summer fun with her school team. She has that ability to listen β if something works, she will run with it. If it doesn't, she will come back to you and say 'Look it's not working, shall we do this?
