Ethan de Groot signed a contract extension through 2029, locking the 28-year-old prop into New Zealand rugby for the foreseeable future. The commitment was not a close call.
“I just didn’t have any interest in going overseas or leaving the All Blacks, to be honest, so I want to be here for a long time,” de Groot told media after the announcement. His reasons are concrete: a Super Rugby title with the Highlanders, a future World Cup, and a Lions series with the All Blacks. The idea of becoming a one-club man, rare in modern professional rugby, holds genuine appeal for him.
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Yet he has left a narrow door open. Speaking while on tour in South Africa, de Groot raised the possibility of a sabbatical, framed not as a career move but as targeted professional development. “I could probably see myself doing a sabbatical over here, do a full year of scrumming over here, learn a few things into the next World Cup,” he said. South Africa and France are the destinations he has in mind. Japan, he noted, would offer little for a front-rower chasing technical refinement.
The reasoning behind those two choices is specific. Both nations have built their rugby identity around the scrum, and de Groot wants to understand how that obsession translates into weekly training culture. “They hang their head on that and it’d just be cool to see how they operate,” he said. “I’ve heard how they do their weeks, how many scrums they do in a week, they love scrumming, so do I, and it would just be cool to see how they operate and their mindset around a few things would be cool to as a learning side of things.”
Any sabbatical remains conditional and distant. For now, de Groot is absorbing South Africa in more immediate ways.
The food has made a strong impression. “It’s on hand, you got biltong and they got these dried sausages things over here, they’re bloody good,” he said. The meat, too, has earned his respect. “And they obviously do a good cut, few T-bones and ribeyes getting around, so they know how to cook their meat over here, I’m enjoying it.”
Off the field, de Groot and several teammates visited a shooting range during the tour. “We got to go shoot some gun, that was pretty cool, got to shoot some AKs and some M16s and if you want to go watch that, it’s on my Instagram,” he said.
The extension signals his intention to build his legacy in black. Whether a sabbatical ever materialises depends on circumstances that remain unresolved, including which World Cup cycle it might serve and whether New Zealand Rugby would sanction the arrangement. What de Groot has made clear is that any time abroad would be a means to an end, not a departure from the path he has chosen.