Dwayne Sweeney was 17 years old, sitting in mass at Hamilton Boys' High, when he was pulled out of class and handed a phone number. On the other end was Ian Foster, telling him to get to Waikato Stadium, he was making his provincial debut against Hawke's Bay that Friday.

In this episode of ShedLife NZ with Jason Davis, Dwayne walks through the full arc of his relationship with Waikato rugby, from that schoolboy debut all the way through to becoming the union's attack coach two decades later. Along the way, Dwayne gets brutally honest about the parts of a professional career that never make the highlight reel. There's the year he barely got paid because he kept missing the game-day 23. There's the infamous training-ground disaster under John Mitchell, the best kick of his life, sailing straight into his own coach's forehead, and the spray that followed. And there's 2004, the only year of his entire Waikato career he never stepped onto the field in an official game. We also get into the moment everything changed, turning down big money in Japan, being told just months after a reassuring dinner that his contract wasn't being renewed, and deciding on the two-minute walk back to his car that he'd come home and become a Centurion for Waikato instead, even if it meant a fraction of the pay. Dwayne closes out the conversation on the hardest transition of all, going from teammate and captain to coach, stepping into the attack coach role under Ross Filipo, and learning what it took to earn the respect of players who'd once called him "skip."