Dwayne Sweeney had every reason to leave Morrinsville behind. Straight out of school, the bigger Hamilton clubs, Old Boys, Fraser Tech, Marist, were all chasing him with better money and stronger teams. Instead, he turned them all down. In this episode of ShedLife NZ with Jason Davis, Dwayne explains why loyalty to his hometown club meant more to him than money, results, or even his own playing time.

Dwayne opens up on the brutal honesty behind those 143 games: the fact that in all that time, he can count on one hand the times he actually beat Morrinsville's biggest local rival, often losing by 50, 60, even 70 points. But for Dwayne, it was never about winning. It was about proving that even in a losing team, you could still show what you were capable of, and that if you could do it there, imagine what you could do somewhere better resourced.

The heart of the episode is the story of 2009: Morrinsville's stunning run to the club championship final, a run that began the very night their coach, Darrin "Sty" Stevenson, suddenly passed away from a heart attack at just 43. Dwayne recounts playing through that grief, defying his own coaches to start a semi-final he was told he couldn't play more than 20 minutes of, and the extraordinary physical toll of playing four games in eight days, including 80 minutes for Waikato, straight into an all-nighter of celebrations, and fronting Mooloo Open Day the very next morning.

We also get into the tension that boiled over after the semi-final: being subbed off late in a one-point game, the blow-up with teammate "Stormy," and the meeting where he was called selfish by his own coaches, before the whole saga resolved in the strangest possible way: a deal struck in a car park at 1am, hours before the biggest game of the season.