'They're getting all our off-cuts': John Manenti on the NRL threat
When John Manenti was a premiership-winning Shute Shield coach, if you'd told him that within six years he would be fighting off advances from rival football codes for Australian rugby's best female talent, he would have given you one of his hard stares then laughed his head off.
Yet that's where Manenti finds himself, coach of Australia's world and Olympic champion women's sevens team and at the vanguard of a sport changing faster than World Rugby law interpretations.
"I didn't [imagine this], but I've worked out you've got to be a little bit flexible and go with the flow a bit and I couldn't be happier about the way things have worked out," the former Eastwood coach said.
"I'm still very close to Eastwood and heavily involved there, and even this week the boys were saying 'do you know what you're doing, taking over the most successful female team we've had in a long time'?
"I've bitten off a fair bit, haven't I? But it's exciting, because I also know they can be better and I know my job now is to not only keep them at the top but to bring through the next generation."
It's a Friday morning and some of the biggest names in women's sport are training on an oval at Santa Sabina College in Sydney's inner west. A few groups of schoolgirls wander over to have a look and at lunchtime, the school's newly formed sevens team will play a friendly against the Aussie women to get a taste of sevens at the pointy end.
Ellia Green, Alicia Quirk and Evania Pelite are all there, as well as captains Sharni Williams and Shannon Parry. The only big names missing are Emma Tonegato and Charlotte Caslick. Tonegato just had a shoulder operation and Caslick has been granted leave to head to Brisbane for a funeral.
The team are preparing for the Sevens World Cup in San Francisco at the end of July but this week Manenti also found himself on the defensive when rugby league emerged as a new suitor for some of his best athletes.
Caslick, the sevens team's highest profile – if not their highest paid – player, was revealed to be in talks with the Broncos about switching codes for the inaugural NRL Women's Premiership this year.
The mere thought of it upset many in rugby, who understandably view rugby league's four-team, four-game offering as light years from the global, full-time professional reach of sevens.
Manenti, old school rugby to his core, described the speculation as a "kidney punch" but could see the bigger picture as well.
"From a female sports point of view, it's fantastic what they [the NRL] are doing in the sense of trying to grow the game and give people opportunities," he said.
"At the moment they're getting all our off-cuts. But there'll be a day where someone comes through their system and says 'I want to be a professional, I want to travel the world, I want to go to the Olympics', and we'll get something out of it."
Ironically, it was rugby that did the poaching when the sevens program went professional in 2014. Caslick and Quirk were touch players, Green was a sprinter and Mahalia Murphy's first love was rugby league. Emma Tonegato won a World Cup with the Jillaroos in 2013. The hunters have become the hunted.
Against this backdrop of rapid change and challenged loyalties, the new Australian women's coach put himself in his daughter's shoes. In Year 4 at school, Ruby Manenti is among the first generation of Australian girls who will grow up regularly watching women play football on television. Her idol is Emma Tonegato.
"Coming here today, we have a chat before training and I was thinking about what I would say to the girls. There's been a lot of talk this week about money and opportunities and different things and I wanted to take it back a bit to the schoolgirls sitting in the park out here, playing for the first time," Manenti said.
"When our girls started playing they didn't pick up a football thinking they would play for Australia. We've got to keep it pure as much as we can and play for the love of the game and for the fact that we can impact the next generation and leave a legacy, so that this becomes a sport that every Saturday people go and play. It is a special opportunity the girls have."