Future Wakefield Trinity man Roger Tuivasa-Sheck has spoken out a “mindset change” that he will utilise in his final season as an NRL player.
Tuivasa-Sheck, 32, will depart the Australian competition after a total of 13 seasons, spread across two stints, to link up with Daryl Powell’s side for the latter stage of his career.
A former All-Black in rugby union and a 25-time rugby league international with New Zealand and Samoa, the outside back brings plenty of experience to Super League and will by far go down as one of the biggest coup’s the northern hemisphere has seen.
However, ‘RTS’ doesn’t make the switch to Wakefield until next season, and there is still plenty of the current campaign to go before he sits down to think about his future club.
After it was announced that he would be leaving the NRL at the season’s end, realisation soon hit that 2026 would be his final season to achieve silverware in the game’s top competition.
Tuivasa-Sheck is already an NRL Grand Final winner having done so with Sydney Roosters in 2013. However, his current club NZ Warriors have never won the Minor Premiership or the Grand Final, so helping the Wahs to some success this year would be a exceptional way to cap off a glistening career in the southern hemisphere.
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After signing the contract, the 32-year-old had a mentality of ‘needing’ to achieve something this season before departing, something he believes has set him back over the last fortnight and has affected the way he plays the game.
Now, after taking a step back and changing his view on the rest of the year, this weekend he was able to produce a sublime performance to help the Warriors defeat Melbourne Storm for the first time since 2015.
“I had a little mindset change over the last two weeks,” Tuivasa-Sheck said post-match as part of an interview with former Hull KR man Jared Waerea-Hargreaves among others.
“Being in my last year, I thought ‘this has to be the year’. “My mindset was ‘it has to be now’.
“I felt like I was overdoing it. I was just doing too much, but tonight I felt like I just had to do my job.”
Realising he doesn’t need to overthink his efforts and instead needs to enjoy his final year as an NRL player, RTS revealed how the simple tweak to his mentality helped him perform back at his usual standard.
He added: “If I do my job the best I can, that will help the team. Instead of thinking ‘this is my last year, I have to go do it now.’ I should just do my process and stick to what I do for the team, and I think I’ll be happy with that.”
