Ardent New Zealand handballer Erin Roxburgh-Makea is empowering young women on and off the court, helping them realise they, too, have the skills to be leaders.
At 29, Erin Roxburgh-Makea feels like she’s finally coming into her sporting prime. But the stages of her career where she can truly make a difference have only just begun.
Roxburgh-Makea is captain of the New Zealand women’s beach handball team and a senior member of the national women’s indoor handball side. She also plays premier grade netball in Wellington.
She’s fitter, stronger and “way more confident” in herself now, especially after overcoming RED-S – a debilitating condition she lived with for three years.
All that, and her life off the court has never been busier.
Proud of her Ngāti Porou and Ngāpuhi roots, Roxburgh-Makea has almost completed her PhD in Māori business. Then she’ll become a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington.
She’s spreading her wings in governance too, on the boards of the Oceania Handball Federation and Women in Sport Aotearoa, where she’s already doing “world-changing” work.
She's not afraid to speak up - calling for a change to international beach handball rules that demand female athletes wear revealing bikini bottoms, and instead allow women to choose what they want to wear.
With all her experiences combined – in just a short space of time – Roxburgh-Makea has become the ideal role model to encourage young women to be leaders. Even if it took her a while to realise her desire to help and contribute was also a form of leadership.
Roxburgh-Makea continues to reinforce her resilience. “Playing a national team sport and doing a PhD is a really good way to develop resilience - having all this criticism thrown at you all the time,” she says.
Her No.1 sport growing up didn't involve a ball. She was "obsessed" with equestrian, and rode competitively for 10 years. “I did mainly dressage, and I loved the perfection of it,” she says.
“But I stopped riding in my first year at uni, because it was a lot of commitment, and so I threw myself into netball."
It was through her husband, Willy Makea, that Roxburgh-Makea discovered handball. They met as summer interns at the New Zealand Treasury, and early in their relationship she went to watch Makea, a New Zealand handball representative, play. Standing on the sidelines, she was invited to give it a go.
“I didn’t love it at the start because I wasn’t good at it. I had to learn a whole new sport because handball’s fundamentals are the opposite of netball’s,” she says.
In fact, there have been times when Roxburgh-Makea has been confused over which sport she's meant to be playing. “Yeah, sometimes in netball I step,” she laughs.
“The good thing is, though, premier netball has become very physical so I’m used to it. People say handball looks like a lot of contact, but I always say contact in netball is just as bad.”
She first made the New Zealand beach handball side in 2016 and the national indoor side two years later. The sport is still in its infancy here, but Roxburgh-Makea was part of history in the first New Zealand handball team to play in a major international tournament, at the Asian champs in 2018. She was planning to play in Taiwan, the United States and South Korea when the global pandemic took hold.
“But in a way, it’s been good for New Zealand handball that we haven’t been able to go overseas – we’ve put all the focus on development and growing the depth of the sport,” she says.
Back in March, New Zealand held its first beach handball nationals, and Roxburgh-Makea, with the Wellington Parrots, won the national women’s title, national mixed title and the North v South series.
“I used to love beach handball a lot more because I was better at it and my netball skills were more transferable. But in the last few years, I’ve become a lot more comfortable with my indoor game – starting to love the contact and taking on the responsibility of shooting.”
Roxburgh-Makea is also on top of her fitness and health, after years of going through RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport).
“I was overtraining, not eating enough food, I had stress fractures, and I lost my period for a few years,” she says.
“I haven’t had to change a lot in my life – I eat way more and plan my exercise schedule better. Now in my netball and handball fitness testing I’m up with the 18-year-olds. I tell young girls now: You earn meals by being alive.”
Roxburgh-Makea has taken on responsibilities off the court, too. Having been on the board of her netball club, Team Vic, she was asked to apply for a position on the New Zealand Handball board.
“I thought ‘There’s no young people on here, there’s no one representing our women’s national team. I guess I could go on and be that person’,” she says.
“It wasn’t until the end of my five years on the board that I realised maybe I do have skills that are transferable to other boards, that I’d been in situations that had made me more resilient.”
So she put her hand up for a place on the board of Women in Sport Aotearoa (WISPA).
“Governance is an area where you can make a lot of change and influence,” she says. “I got a really good feeling with WISPA that I’d be well-supported and be able to get my hands on some world-changing work. And I have so far - it’s been an amazing opportunity.
“One of the projects I’m sinking my teeth into is with the WISPA rōpū group we’ve started - we’re looking at almost rewriting our strategy and embedding biculturalism into it in a meaningful way. When I think about Te Ao Māori [the Māori world view] and its values and I think about sport, there are some really nice pairings.
“Sport can teach you so much about life. You have to learn how to work with different people, the resilience to feedback, how to plan. For some people, sport is a safe haven from things going on around them. I’m hoping embedding more Te Ao Māori through that, they can bring their identity into sport.
“I wish I’d been encouraged to bring more of that side of my culture into playing my sport.”
Roxburgh-Makea is also involved with Whanake o te Kōpara – translated as the rise of the female bellbird – a programme guiding young women aged 19 to 25 into sports leadership. “I'm really proud of being able to help young women with action plans of things they’re going to do in their communities,” she says.
She hopes next week’s online Sport NZ Women + Girls Summit, which WISPA helps to deliver, will encourage kōhine (young women) to recognise the skills they have that can be taken into leadership roles.
“People say they want more rangatahi [young people] on boards, but there’s a gap because a lot of rangatahi don’t think they have the skills to be leaders. Actually, there a lot of young people doing amazing things and they would well and truly have the skillsets to be in positions of influence,” she says.
“They just don’t know those skills are valuable. They don’t see the things they’re doing every day for their sports community or their marae are governance on the ground. I think I was in a similar position.
“So I’m hoping a lot of young people will watch and feel inspired by the things they’re doing in their own backyard.”
Roxburgh-Makea is only months away from finishing her doctorate, where she’s been looking at governance in Māori organisations.
She was originally drawn to study commerce, she says, because she was “obsessed with money and how business works… In my undergrad years I was always thinking of different businesses I wanted to start, which came from being really competitive.”
A scholarship to attend a Māori business conference in 2014 showed her how Māori values could be used in business, and inspired her to do her PhD studies in it.
Soon she’ll take up a role of lecturer at Victoria University in special interest Māori business papers.
“It’s a bit of a dream come true,” she says. “Hopefully it will all work in with my active lifestyle; balancing being an amateur athlete with work is hard. If I had a nine-to-five job, I wouldn’t be able to do all these things.”
* The Sport NZ Women + Girls Summit, delivered by Women in Sport Aotearoa and The Shift Foundation, is a one-day online event on Wednesday, September 29. You can register to attend here.
