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Four fast friends teamed up to take on the Raiders’ annual Pretty Tough Sheila challenge last month and came out with an unexpected win.
Competing under the moniker ‘Bitches be crazy’, Chevania Johnson, Esther Marsters, Joey Hayward and Heather Haenga navigated the challenge course for four hours in the sun. The team knew each other well from playing tag together at the club so their teamwork led them to a solid victory.
Club chair Seth Gleeson says the competition is not just physical. The 10 challenges range from a tyre push to cooking a steak, and every year there’s a mystery challenge thrown in. This year it was to skull a beer before a three-legged race followed closely by a piggy-back challenge.
“With just a ‘can do’ attitude, you can get through all of the challenges. A few people were daunted by the heavy lifting until they saw the first challenge. Really it was just laughs all round in the end,” Gleeson said.
Most of the competitors were tag players, club supporters, or partners of players, although a couple of teams were new to the club, hearing about the competition online.
Johnson said the team of women had missed out on the inaugural competition and hearing everyone talk about how much fun it was, they decided to enter this year. Haenga had competed before, but she joined the team at the last-minute when circumstances meant fourth team member Sezzy Tawheta was unable to participate. Tawheta joined in to cheer her team on from the sidelines though.
“Being sports ladies, we were quite competitive. We planned to train for the competition but all of us being busy mums, it was hard to get together. So we just strategised over a group chat. That’s where the team name came from,” Johnson said.
Though Johnson admits most of the strategy had to be done on the day when they could see the course and the challenges. The key was that every team member had to participate.
“The hardest one for us was building the picnic table because it was the first challenge so we couldn’t strategise beforehand. All the pieces were piled up and we couldn’t see what went where.
“But later, when we had to back up a boat trailer, we knew there were points when we had to switch out drivers. So we strategised based on what we could do. Joey and I could back a trailer, but Esther and Heather couldn’t, so we did the harder parts and gave them the easy parts.
“None of us knew how to operate a digger but we smashed that one. We worked together. When one person was on the digger, the rest of us were on both sides just communicating and making sure they had help,” Johnson said.
Throughout the competition it wasn’t clear which team was leading and in the end it came down to a one-point difference. Johnson says the team is determined to come back to defend their title next year.
Announcing the winners on Facebook, the club tagged other rugby league clubs on the North Shore. Gleeson said it was a bit of friendly banter and hoped other clubs would join in next year when the competition returned with the same format, but fresh challenges.
