query: sport poverty bay rugby football union
supports: The National Provincial Championship, or NPC, was the major domestic rugby competition in New Zealand. The NPC saw many alterations to its format and brand. Since 2006, it has been replaced by two competitions, the ITM Cup (originally the Air New Zealand Cup) and the Heartland Championship. From the 2011 Season, the top Division was split into two tiers based on the 2010 Table after Pool Play. Teams 17 were assigned to the Premiership and teams 814 to the Championship. There is automatic Promotion/Relegation between the two tiers and also "crossover" matches, as well as full Round Robin Matches within each tier. The Heartland Championship is also split into two tiers after pool play with the top tier playing for the Meads Cup and bottom tier playing for the Lochore Cup. Currently all 26 of New Zealand's Provincial Unions participate in either the Air New Zealand Cup or Heartland Championship.
  The NPC was first contested in 1976, and although the basic format of Division One was much the same from then until the 2006 reorganisation, there were a number of changes to the lower divisions. England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west. The Irish Sea lies northwest of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain (which lies in the North Atlantic) in its centre and south; and includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly, and the Isle of Wight. A try is a way of scoring points in rugby union and rugby league football. A try is scored by grounding the ball (the ball must be touching the player when coming into contact with the ground) in the opposition's in-goal area (on or behind the goal line). Rugby union and league differ slightly in defining 'grounding the ball' and the 'in-goal' area. A team sport includes any sport which involves two or more players working together towards a shared objective. A team sport is an activity in which individuals are organized into opposing teams which compete to win. Examples are basketball, volleyball, water polo, handball, lacrosse, cricket, baseball, and the various forms of football and hockey. Rugby union, or simply rugby, is a contact team sport which originated in England in the first half of the 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand. In its most common form, a game is between two teams of 15 players using an oval-shaped ball on a rectangular field with H-shaped goalposts on each try line. Rugby is a type of football developed at Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, one of many versions of football played at English public schools in the 19th century. The two main types of rugby are rugby league and rugby union. Although rugby league initially used rugby union rules, they are now wholly separate sports. The Heartland Championship competition, known for sponsorship reasons as the Mitre 10 Heartland Championship, is a domestic rugby union competition in New Zealand. It was founded in 2006 as one of two successor competitions to the country's former domestic competition, the National Provincial Championship (NPC). The country's 27 provincial teams were split into two separate competitions. Thirteen of the original teams, plus one merged side created from two other teams, entered the new top-level professional competition, the Air New Zealand Cup (now known as the Mitre 10 Cup). The remaining 12 sides entered the new Heartland Championship, whose teams contest two distinct trophies, both named after legendary New Zealand players: The Poverty Bay Rugby Football Union is the governing body for rugby union within the Gisborne district , in the area surrounding Poverty Bay on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand . The men 's representative team play from Rugby Park , Gisborne , and currently compete in the Heartland Championship . The Mitre 10 Cup (colloquially referred to as "National Provincial Championship" or "NPC") is the highest level of New Zealand domestic rugby union competition, contested annually from late August to early November and managed by the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU). Building on competitions dating back to the National Provincial Championship in 1976, with teams from a number of provinces, the Mitre 10 Cup officially started with the 2006 season with 14 teams after the National Provincial Championship (NPC) was split into this professional competition and the amateur Heartland Championship competition. The competition was known as the Air New Zealand Cup to the end of the 2009 season; the name then changed to the ITM Cup for the 2010 season after ITM, the trading name of Independent Timber Merchants Co-operative Ltd., a New Zealand building supplies retailer took over as lead sponsor. In 2016 the New Zealand-owned home improvement and garden retailer, Mitre 10 took over sponsorship after out-bidding ITM.
candidates: baseball basketball cricket lacrosse rugby rugby league running sport united kingdom volleyball water polo
answer: rugby league