Sideline Sid Sports correspondent & historian www.sunlive.co.nz

Next Saturdays dawn (15 April 2023), will kick-start a season of celebration for the Mount Maunganui Sports Club.

Mount Maunganui Rugby Club, who were the founding entity of the Mount Sports Club, will embark on a time of remembering the club's roots, which started one hundred years ago.

The Mount Rugby Club Centenary, will culminate in the 100th year formation celebrations, on the 'Matariki' long weekend that commences on Friday 14th July 2023.

While the Tauranga Rugby Union 1923 season, is agreed as the Mount Maunganui Rugby Club start, there is evidence that the Mount fielded a rugby team at least a couple of years earlier.

A Bay of Plenty Times article dated 9 May 1921, carries a report of a Jordan Cup (TRU Championship) match at Mount Maunganui, between a home side and the Tauranga Rugby Club representatives.

Victory went the visitors, who would have travelled to Mount Maunganui by harbour ferry, by a margin of 17 points to three.

The early history of the Mount Maunganui Rugby Club, tells us that a group of young men who mainly worked at the (New Zealand) Public Works Department workshops, when the East Coast railway line was being fabricated, formed the Mount Rugby Club in 1923.

Further evidence of the official start of the club that plays in the green and gold strip with absolute pride, is contained in another Bay of Plenty Times piece in June 1923. "On Wednesday last a very successful dance was held by the new football club at the Mount.”

One hundred years ago, groups tended to get together and just play sport rather than proceed through the formalities of forming a club, which is the likely scenario of the 1921 Mount Maunganui rugby team.

The club's ability to field teams before and during World War 11 varied depending on player availability, in what was still a small village.

However this changed late in 1946, when the Mount Maunganui Rugby Club was reformed after the war, with the club going on to develop into one of the powerhouse's of Bay of Plenty club rugby today.

Nearly a decade passed, before Mount Maunganui stamped its mark as a genuine TRU championship heavyweight, with their first two of ten Jordan Cup victories, in 1955 and 1957.

Baywide rugby introduced in 1990 changed the Tauranga club rugby landscape forever. The Jordan Cup status diminished and the trophy was eventually retired, before being reintroduced as Western Bay of Plenty Rugby Sub-Union challenge trophy, played within Baywide premier competition.

The first decade of Baywide rugby, was dominated by Rotorua and Eastern Bay of Plenty teams lifting the new symbol of Bay of Plenty club rugby supremacy aloft in triumph.

Mount Maunganui, became the first of just two Western Bay teams to win Baywide premier title in the first ten years, with victory in 1993.

Twelve more years would pass before the green and gold brigade would earn their second Baywide crown in July 2005.

Further Baywide success in 2014 and 2017 saw the Mount looking for their fifth title last season.

Playing at home, the Mount representatives steamrolled Rotorua side Whakarewarewa into submission, 52-16, in semifinal action for the right to meet Te Puna in the title decider.

A one-point thriller, saw Mount Maunganui defeat Te Puna at Blake Park in the Baywide final, coming from behind to hang on for the last fifteen minutes, in posting a 27-26 victory.

This season, the Mount Maunganui premiers will enter the 2023 Baywide title race with the heavy cloak of clinching back to back title victories, in order to add the icing of a Baywide crown to their centennial year celebrations.

Huge pride in the Green and Gold will stiffen the resolve of the Mount top echelon team to earn the Baywide big prize in their centennial year.