Confessions of a netball dad: The rotten, toxic truth about trialling for top school teams

A father shares his impressions from his time standing courtside. Illustration / Rod Emmerson

As we say goodbye to 2023 and welcome in 2024, it’s a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views our audience loved the most. This story first ran in August.

OPINION

For 10 years I have been a netball dad, in which time I have seen enough to be sure that at the school level, the game meets every criterion to be considered toxic - devoid of core values, dominated by adults with big egos and warped ethics and elite players with a hard-to-understand sense of entitlement.

What follows are true confessions from my time standing courtside.

My daughter knew it was a trick long before I did – a pointless waste of her time.

She was in Year 11 and I suggested she trial for the school’s Premier squad.

I wasn’t delusional, or pushy. I suggested it because I felt she was genuinely capable of playing at that level – that it would in fact be the right level for her.

She was 1.85m and the family joke was that she played like she was 1.95m because she had arms like an orangutan.

Read More

Confessions of a netball dad part 1: The worst things I’ve seen courtside in NZ

She was mobile, agile, strong and difficult to push about, and I presumed those picking the top teams would see her in a trial and realise that while she still had plenty to learn about the technical nuances of her defensive role, she was a natural athlete with enormous potential.

I thought that at 1.85m she wouldn’t have to do much to get noticed in a height-based game and that she would pique the interest of whoever was going to be coaching.

She was in possession of all the things that can’t be coached: height, speed and an incredible standing jump. Anyone with good technical knowledge could have produced massive growth in her game.

But of course what I didn’t understand (but my daughter did) is that school netball doesn’t do trials, but show trials where the verdicts are reached long before there has been any court activity.

Coaches don’t seem to have any ability or desire to recognise athletic potential and they certainly don’t seem to want to invest time in trying to develop a player they don’t know.

And that was the part I didn’t realise. The Premier squad had been picked long before the “trial”.

The coaches already had their favourites, the kids they knew and liked and the kids they had decided from a ludicrously young age were the best and always would be.

Here’s the crazy thing about netball - your fate is decided in Year 9. You turn up at high school and maybe at the trial you get lucky, play well and get noticed.

But more likely, you get noticed because the grapevine has done the hard work for you.

Somehow various kids arrived at school with their reputation proceeding them – their place in the top team already assured because the head of netball had heard great things.

Mostly, though, the kids who had generated so much buzz had just reached puberty earlier and they had gone through intermediate school either taller or faster than their peers.

And this is why netball was such a maddening experience. Some of these kids who were given favoured and treasured status in Year 9 had been overtaken by many of their peers by Year 10.

They were no longer the tallest, fastest or best, but no one in the coaching fraternity wanted to admit that.

They had closed the shop to new players because they wanted to justify their talent identification programmes, which was an odd thing to be so highly protective of.

It was more than odd. It was self-destructive as kids grow, they develop at different times and at a different pace to one another and every adult surely knows that the stubby 13-year-old who has no confidence can blossom into a long-limbed 15-year-old with previously unrealised abilities.

It’s the whole nature of school sport – the people playing it not only physically change year to year in a way adults don’t, but so too do they work out who they are - and the transitions can be stunning.

To believe it’s possible to correctly identify all the star players in Year 9 is both delusional and reductive and yet this was the system by which netball was governed.

For whatever reason, the egos of the netball chiefs at my daughter’s school were too fragile to admit that some of the players they had picked in Year 9 weren’t the right ones and so rather than open the door and embrace the many kids who had outgrown many of their preferred elite peers by Year 11, it was metaphorically slammed in their face.

There are three significant reasons which make me certain the system was rigged and that my daughter never had a chance of being picked – which she wasn’t.

The first came a week later, when she attended the trial for all the other senior kids who hadn’t made the Premier team.

Afterwards, the head of netball sought her out and told her she had been brilliant and asked why she hadn’t trialled for the Premier team, because she most definitely would have been picked if she had.

This is the same head of netball who oversaw every minute of the Premier trials.

Secondly, none of the kids who ended up making the Premier team had to trial. My suspicion is that the coaches don’t want to run the risk of their chosen ones being embarrassed and for the non-chosen ones to see for themselves that they are the better players.

The system needs to perpetuate the myth that the chosen ones are better, and a trial would potentially unearth an ugly secret.

And thirdly, when my daughter was in Year 13, happily playing for the third team alongside other unfairly shunned girls, she was spotted by a senior women’s Premiership club who called her up to play for them one weekend – which she couldn’t because of other commitments.

The club were obviously keen, though, because they wanted her to join them the season after she left school – but she was leaving home for university.

I have never lived vicariously through my children or held sporting dreams on their behalf.

All I have ever wanted is for them to be fairly rewarded: to be picked in the team they deserve to be in.

My only expectation of school sport was that it would do its job – to teach them they can learn from adversity, overcome disappointment by working hard and see that perseverance and discipline lead to improvements and improvements lead to being noticed.

The saddest part of my eldest daughter’s netball experience was that I stopped telling her that if she played well and worked hard, the opportunities would come.

The culture of the Premier team was rotten, the values non-existent and it was a tense, stressful, toxic environment.

I stopped because we both knew it wasn’t true and she played her heart out each week - not with any expectation it would lead to her being promoted to the team she should be in - but because that’s the person she is.

Just how broken the whole system was became apparent when she reached Year 13 and there were just 10 girls from her year group still playing. There had been more than 120 in Year 9.

And yet more madly, when the Premier team predictably was being thumped each week, the remedy was to throw Year 10 kids into the mix.

This was doubling down on this ridiculous conviction that coaching pedigree was linked exclusively to identifying young talent and finding ways to eliminate or smooth the fluctuations that are a natural and integral part of the school sporting cycle.

Some year groups are strong, others not so much and coaches are supposed to find ways to get the most out of what they have, not artificially manipulate the system to try to give themselves a better talent pool.

I was a bit sad for my daughter that she never got the chance to represent the top team at her school and enjoy that moment.

But she wasn’t, because she also knew the culture of the Premier team was rotten, the values non-existent and that it was a tense, stressful, toxic environment.

Which is a whole other story for another day.