Codie Taylor was a young child in Queensland who hardly knew rugby union existed long before he was captaining the All Blacks’ haka. Shortly after his birth in Levin in 1991, his parents, Nathan and Christine, relocated the family to Brisbane. It was in the suburbs that young Codie first picked up a ball, playing rugby league rather than union because that was the most popular sport on the local fields. It’s an important detail that is often overlooked in accounts of his career. Early in his athletic career, the young man who would eventually anchor New Zealand’s scrum chased an entirely different code.
When Codie was eleven years old, the family moved back to Levin to be nearer to family. His rugby education really starts on that return. Horowhenua College, a small secondary school in a town more famous for its market gardens than All Blacks, was where he enrolled. That beginning is almost unremarkable; there was no prestigious academy or accelerated talent pipeline, just a small-town classroom and a school field where he switched codes and began learning union from the ground up.
A rugby scholarship to Feilding High School, where he boarded away from home to hone his skills and, consequently, his education, was the turning point. Taylor was forced into a more serious, structured environment during his time at Feilding, which has a reputation in New Zealand rugby circles for producing more All Blacks than its fair share. He participated in First XV rugby, which is the level at which coaches begin molding players rather than merely observing their growth.
Taylor’s position changed during these school years. He had begun his career as a flanker and prop, which speaks to his early physique and instincts—more force than skill. Coaches at the time pushed him in the direction of Hooker after noticing his hands and throwing accuracy. That’s a big change. Arguably the most technical position in the front row, hooker requires accuracy under duress that a prop hardly ever needs. Some quiet credit should go to whoever made that early call.
Outside of the classroom, Taylor played age-grade rugby for Horowhenua-Kapiti, winning the Hurricanes Under-18 competition and being chosen for the National Under-18 Sevens. At the time, these events didn’t make headlines. These were regional victories, the kind that only garner a paragraph in the local newspaper. However, they laid the groundwork for him to join the Canterbury academy system and, ultimately, the New Zealand Under-20 team that won the Junior World Championship in 2011.
A more subdued aspect of all of this is that Taylor subsequently learned that he is a direct descendant of Walter Pringle, one of the men who is credited with creating the haka Ka Mate. He was not aware of that as a child. It feels less like fate and more like an odd, fitting coincidence because it only came to light after he had already made it into professional rugby.
The educational portion of his story was officially over by the time he made his debut for the Crusaders in 2013 and the All Blacks in 2015. However, it’s difficult to look at his current style of play—the composure under duress, the accuracy in crucial situations—without linking it to the modest fields at Horowhenua College and a boarding scholarship at Feilding that demanded more of him than he likely anticipated at the time.
