Clark has seen it all — a couple of shocking seasons, a championship, good rugby and bad — in his 14 years as Highlanders chief executive.
This year featured some pleasing highs, notably a win over the Crusaders and a bump from ninth place to sixth, along with a five-game losing run and some reasonably comprehensive losses to the best teams in the competition.
"From my perspective, it was a pass, and a pretty solid season," Clark said.
"We definitely made an improvement on previous years, not just by making the playoffs.
"We were able to blood a lot of young players and form a nucleus of a group that’s going to take this club forward for a number of years, so that for me was a real positive.
"But at the end of the day, with the good, there was some rubbish from a performance perspective, and that inconsistency is something we have to delve into in our review.
"A lot of that could be just from being so young. Your expectations can be high, but we do have a lot of inexperience."
The Highlanders won six games in 2024, one more than last year.
But Clark was brutally honest when he reflected on the fact they were well off the pace set by the best teams in Super Rugby.
"The reality is we didn’t beat anyone above us. We beat teams below us in the competition.
"The teams at the top — the top three, anyway — are 25 to 35 points ahead of us, and that’s a big gap.
"The big challenge for us, and we’re all very cognisant of it, is to bridge that gap.
"No-one comes in here and wants to be beaten by 25 points by the Blues or the Hurricanes or the Chiefs. We are striving to beat all of them."
Clark stood by the Highlanders’ grand plan to revitalise the club with a swag of rookies.
They were investing in good young men — off the field and on it — and would work hard to make them better players.
Having former Highlanders coach Jamie Joseph installed as head of rugby had helped a relatively inexperienced set of coaches and players, and Joseph was driving the roster-building process, Clark said.
"A big part of Jamie’s mandate is to make sure we retain the players we want to retain, and recruit the players we want to recruit.
"He’s had a focus on that right since February, when he started, and he’s working hard in that space."
The Highlanders have no more than four contracts open for 2025, and they will likely be filled out of the NPC ranks.
Off the field, the club is working hard to thrive in the post-Covid rebuilding era.
Their total crowd figure for the season of 75,108 met budget for the first time since the pre-pandemic days, and targeting families with the take-a-kid-for-free promotion had been a success, Clark said.
A big project now is revamping their headquarters next to Forsyth Barr Stadium.
They once were effectively joint tenants with High Performance Sport, but many of those sports and athletes had left, and the Highlanders’ numbers had ballooned from about 50 players and staff a decade ago to close to 100.
The Highlanders will take over the head lease on the building from July 1 and are working on redevelopment plans with a focus on locker room and shower facilities.
