Stacey Waaka

Stacey Jamie Aroha Kirsten Waaka (born 3 November 1995) is a New Zealand rugby league player who plays at wing for New Zealand Warriors in the NRLW.

She formerly played fifteen-a-side and seven-a-side rugby union, and was a member of the New Zealand Women's Sevens team and New Zealand Women's National Rugby Union team. Waaka was a member of the New Zealand Women's Sevens team which won gold medals at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. She was also a member of the New Zealand fifteen-a-side team which won the 2017 Women's Rugby World Cup and the 2021 Women's Rugby World Cup. Following the Paris Olympics she spent the Sevens off-season playing rugby league during an injury-disrupted 2024 season with the Brisbane Broncos.

Waaka was born on 3 November 1995 in Papakura, New Zealand to Raewyn (née Allan) and Simon Waaka. She has four older siblings, Shannon, Bronson and Beaudein and was the only one born in New Zealand as her parents moved the family moved back and forth between Australia and Auckland several times. When she was one years old the family moved back to Australia, and lived in Melbourne for eight years. One Christmas, she and her brother Beaudein spent time with their grandmother Kiri on the farm and didn't want to leave. As a result, her parents decided to move back permanently in 2005 to farm in Ruatoki in the eastern Bay of Plenty.

Her father had 17 siblings, and as a result Waaka has more than 70 first cousins, many of them resident in the area around Ruatoki. Her father played rugby and so did her brothers, while her sister played netball and mother in her youth played athletics, gymnastics, tennis and netball.^{[citation needed]}

in 2011, at the age of 15 Waaka was on her way home in a school bus near Ruatoki when it was hit from behind by an unladen truck. The impact was sufficient to throw her from her seat, and she came to lying in the aisle of the bus, on top of other children. Using her cellphone she called the police for help before assisting some of the injured children off the bus, including her niece and nephew. She then walked to a nearby Matariki Early Childhood Centre to telephone her mother before returning to the crash site where she helped other children. In all 36 people were injured with 28 taken to hospitals, many of them with broken bones. Waaka received lacerations to her legs which prevented her playing sports for a few months.

By the age of 15 Waaka was a New Zealand touch youth international.

While encouraged to consider playing rugby by friends and coaches at school she rejected the game as she had her heart set on representing New Zealand at netball. After she heard through ads on TV in 2012 for the "Go for Gold" programme that Sevens rugby was to be an Olympic sport, she realised she could have an opportunity to play rugby full-time. As a result, despite some concerns over tackling she decided to give rugby a go. At the age of 16 she was one of the 800 young women who attended the "Go for Gold" Sevens trials in 2012 organised to identify talent with the potential to represent New Zealand in the Sevens competition at the Rio Olympics. At the trial she attended she was put through various fitness, rugby skills and character assessment activities. However she wasn't prepared to commit to the Sevens as she wanted to enjoy high school. It wasn't until she began playing for the Waikato women's team in the 2014 Farah Palmer Cup that she was noticed in 2014 and was invited to attend a couple of Sevens training camps.

Waaka debuted for the fifteen-a-side New Zealand Women's rugby team in their game against Canada on 27 June 2015, the same year her brother Beaudein Waaka made his Rugby sevens debut for New Zealand.