Online Reporter
Tadious Manyepo
Zimpapers Sports Hub
THE Zimbabwe Netball Association have placed the game on a major growth trajectory after inking a technical pact with Netball South Africa.
South Africa is one of the best netball nations globally with their national team, the Spar Proteas ranked fifth in the world behind only powerhouses Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica and England.
Thanks to their sophisticated structure and system. And it is those viable systems from across the Limpopo that Zimbabwe netball will benefit from after ZINA took advantage of their interaction with Netball South Africa in the ongoing Telcom League series to strike a Memorandum of Understanding.
Zimbabwe have seconded a select team, the Zambezi Eagles currently taking part in the Telcom League Power Week 2.
The same team also participated in the Power Week 1 phase.
Speaking about the MoU, ZINA technical director John Banda said, “development in terms of netball is not only centred on the players themselves.” We are going to start from the top, from administrators themselves. They also have to have the right qualifications and the right training. We go to our technical team, the coaches and team managers,” he said.
“For example, in this Telcom Netball League Power tournaments, we have umpires who are at a higher level officiating, and our players are not, at times, exposed to that type of officiating.
“They will only meet that type of officiating when they are actually participating at the highest level, in the World Cup and that has a negative impact on the performance of the team you see now.
“So in preparation for this, we have to engage with South Africa for capacity-building purposes for our players, our administrators and everything else.
“So that’s when we got into this MoU with Netball South Africa. We said we are going to do that in phases. So in August, that is from the 20th to the 24th of August, they are bringing in their tutors from South Africa.
“They are going to train our umpires, our coaches, our bench officials and then they are also going to train our team managers.”
Banda said Zimbabwe will now be a permanent feature of the Telcom Netball League series, with local players now in line to get access to high-performance hubs dotted across South Africa. “So after this again, we are also looking forward to a situation whereby we have both our coaches and players also going to South Africa,” Banda added.
“We’re taking part in those tournaments. We are also looking at a situation whereby we also expose our players to South African clubs. You know, South Africa has universities that are also taking players. So that’s basically what we are looking at. It’s more — it’s a drive for capacity building and capacity development.
“This one (Telcom Netball League) is an annual thing. So now that we have established this MoU, it will also assist us in making sure that it becomes one of our major tournaments that we will be taking part in.”
Looking into the future, Banda said: “We have got our Inter-provincial netball championships, each province is going to come up with its own provincial team.
“Selection of players is going to be done from grassroots, whether they are going to select players from schools, from clubs, from universities, colleges, or whatever, they will choose their own provincial coach and make their selection of 15 players.
“Because we are saying this is a developmental thing, we may put an age restriction on the players who are going to bring into the provincial teams who could scale it, let’s say under 25 or under 23 or whatever, because it’s developmental. So we will converge in Bulawayo over a period of about three days, and then we are going to have a team of scouts who are going to be sniffing for talent.”
