Mrs Rich and her team will be among about 5000 senior sports enthusiasts and supporters in Christchurch for a coming-together of the Golden Oldies sports movement, which started with a 15-team rugby tournament in Auckland in 1979.
The roots of her own involvement were really being sown about about 1970, when her friends and their children would gather down for nine-a-side midweek ladies netball on the now long-gone Marine Parade courts.
"When it was bad weather we would get a broom and sweep the sand and rocks away," she said.
She ran it for about 16 years at the new Onekawa courts with a peak of 47 teams, with a creche at the courts and pushchairs on the sidelines, before numbers started to dwindle as people's lives changed with the advent of such things as Saturday shopping.
She formed the Napier Rebels Golden Oldies netball team which played its first Golden Oldies World netball festival in Christchurch in 1990 and has spent much of the past 28 years immersed in the fundraising and trips, to such places as San Diego, Hawaii, Singapore, Rarotonga, Fiji and Surfers Paradise — "just to name a few," she said.
Much of the travel has been funded by sausage sizzles, but that opportunity has changed over the years, with members of the team, now including four from Whanganui, choosing to make their own regular payments.
Open to men and women aged 35 and beyond, Golden Oldies sports tournaments are held all over the world and this year's event marks the first time in history multiple Golden Oldies sporting events are held in the same host city, bringing netball together with rugby (men's and women's), hockey, cricket, bowls, and golf.
Mrs Rich said the best part is the opportunity to travel the world, playing her favourite sport, without pressure of winning or losing, and meeting great friends.
"I love that I can travel and visit places I've never visited before," she said.
Husband and seasoned team and Golden Oldies supporter Tony will also be there, and would have been in sporting heaven had his beloved Crusaders not been playing away, in South Africa, during his week in Christchurch.
While there are men in the netball tournament, Mrs Rich said: "He doesn't play. He just sits there while we're playing and watches all our bags."