Andrew
Arthur Choga
NETBALL is a sport that has often divided perceptions.
Depending on which school you attended in Zimbabwe, netball was either the top sport or it was not even offered.
In rural schools, netball ranks alongside football as the main sport. In many cases, the netball team is the one that brings in the accolades, winning cluster tournaments. In the education sector, a cluster is a group of schools geographically close to each other, which exchange skills for the children’s benefit.
The netball team sometimes makes it to the district competitions, where the children get to ride a bus to the nearest major town and compete against other schools. Making it to the provincial finals is a major achievement. Getting to the national finals improves the legendary status of each of the players.
In many private schools and former Group A schools, netball is a minority sport, falling behind rugby, cricket, basketball, football, hockey, tennis and squash, in some cases. It is more of a novelty than a competitive discipline. There may be a few lessons on it in a Physical Education class, but that is pretty much the extent of the sport.
It makes interesting reading, therefore, when the national netball team makes it to two World Cup finals in a row.
This achievement is noteworthy because netball is not one of the loudest sports in the country.
Under the guidance of, first, Lloyd Makunde and now Ropafadzo Mutsauki, the team has steered through qualification tournaments and made it to the finals, picking up a host of new fans along the way.
There is more to this team than just happy dances and merry songs. They have shown resilience and a commitment to their game by overcoming much-fancied opponents to qualify.
The Gems are ranked 12th in the World. They finished eighth at the last World Cup in 2019.
In Africa, they rank behind South Africa (fifth in the world), Malawi (sixth) and Uganda (seventh ).
The Under-21 team made it to the 2017 World Cup in Botswana and a number of the players have now made it into the Gems team.
The level of continuity is commendable.
The sport even boasts a foreign-based star, captain and goal defender Felistas Kwangwa, who plays in England for Surrey Storm, where she has been regularly picked as a standout player.
The success of the current team needs to be celebrated with one eye on the future.
Thousands of girls playing netball in schools each year are inspired by the exploits of the senior national team.
The team has set a high bar against which all future teams will be measured. Setting a world class standard is good for benchmarking. Some sports have a benchmark that does not inspire confidence.
The challenge for the Zimbabwe Netball Association now is to harness the enthusiasm and passion at the earliest levels of the game into future Gems appearances.
Great sports teams sometimes form dynasties, winning multiple championships and gaining global recognition. Administrators tend to keep these teams together as they perform well, and even as they begin to drop off their optimum levels. The great Cameroon side of the early 2000s won the Africa Cup of Nations title in 2000, the Olympic gold medal in the same year and the AFCON title again in 2002, before sliding away and failing to qualify for the 2006 World Cup in Germany.
They then scraped through to the next two editions in 2010 and 2014, performing dismally at both, before failing to qualify for 2018.
The Mighty Warriors, the Zimbabwe women’s football team, scored success by qualifying for the Olympics in 2016. Thereafter, the junior football development programmes that had been running seemed to melt away as sponsorship and administrative issues took centre stage.
The Gems must now put in place a succession plan for this great team, which stretches even down to the Under-13 level, to ensure their culture and playing style are captured from an early age.
A clear programme involving schools and organisations such as the National Association of Secondary School Heads and the National Association of Primary School Heads must be activated and actively create commercial partnerships, which will run the programme.
A lack of continuity is the greatest enemy of sporting success. When a team hits a peak and cannot replenish itself sufficiently with new players coming through the ranks, that team will decline and become a sad memory of what it once was.
The Gems are well-placed to avoid such a fate and Leticia Chipandu and her team have every opportunity to bring all stakeholders together and build a sustainable future for netball in Zimbabwe.
Their success affords them a chance to harness resources while their brand is at an all-time high, and convert them into a lifetime of achievement and progress in the game.
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