Busy schedule for SA netball

2008-08-07 15:31

Pretoria - Netball South Africa (NSA) vice-president Blanche de la Guerre on Thursday confirmed the international programme for the national team for the next few months.

"Barbados will be coming out in October for a three-Test series, and this morning, I received confirmation of our invitation to visit Jamaica for a Tri-nations tournament against Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago," she said.

"We need to bring international netball back to South Africa," she said.

"We also need to have Tests so that our new coach, Karin Strauss, can put her ideas into practice. She is a young coach with innovative ideas, and we are looking forward to seeing what she can do.

"We will be using our brand-new sprung wooden floor in that series, which is very exciting." De la Guerre confirmed that NSA were receiving financial support from the Department of Sport and Recreation and the national Lotto as well as their team and tournament sponsors, Spar, so they had the money for international competitions and the training camps for the training squad of about 30 players expected to be announced on Friday.

Find a permanent home for the training

She said NSA had selected the High Performance Institute in Potchefstroom as a base for the training programme for the national team.

"We needed to find a permanent home for the training camps that would be netball specific. We also needed to find somewhere where the players can train on the special wooden floor, because there is no point in them training on a hard floor and then playing Tests on a sprung floor." De la Guerre explained that it had been impossible to use the wooden floors for the national tournament currently being played at the Pretoria University Indoor Sports Centre.

"We needed to have a venue where two A-section matches could be played simultaneously, but unfortunately, the hall we have selected could not accommodate both floors, and we couldn't have one match on a hard floor and the other on a sprung floor," she said.

Regarding NSA's controversial racial quotas policy, she said that it would be discussed at the meeting of the NSA Council. At present, teams are either rewarded or penalised for their compliance or non-compliance with the required seven/five quota in a squad of 12.

"The Council will also look at the composition of the A-section, and decide whether it needs to be reduced and whether we should have a promotion and relegation system."

- SAPA