Dana Johannsen: Quantity may hit the quality

Photo / Sarah Ivey

If you were to do a quick vox pop of the ANZ Championship coaches and ask them what they are expecting from the 2011 season, there is a common theme to their answers - tough, physical, highly pressurised and mentally draining.

The first three seasons have been more than a competition, it has been an evolutionary journey to making the sport fully professional, and players and coaches have had to quickly adjust to the demanding new environment.

This year will be an even tougher physical examination, thanks to a revised calendar.

In order to shoehorn the season in before the world championships in Singapore in July, the competition was brought forward to a summer start and the regular season condensed to 12 rounds, with the three-week finals series to follow.

As well as the traditional Saturday, Sunday and Monday games, 2011 features Thursday nights for the first time, through the introduction of double rounds. It means the Waikato/Bay of Plenty Magic's first three games will be played in eight days.

The earlier start date this year has also presented a huge challenge for coaches to get their sides up and running in the shortened preparation time.

Their build-up was further complicated by the absence of international players during last month, with both the New Zealand and Australian national sides embarking on tours to the Northern Hemisphere last month.

The Silver Ferns played three tests against England, while Australia had three games against Jamaica.

Given the compressed timeframe teams have been working under and the disruptions the international tours caused to their January programmes, it is inevitable the standard of netball over the opening few weeks of the competition will be a little bit ropey.

However, most coaches are still upbeat about their prospects of getting their teams firing on all cylinders by the time they hit the court in their opening game.

Magic coach Noeline Taurua, on the other hand, is a little more realistic. She believes it is likely many teams, including her own, will be still fine-tuning their gameplan through the first few rounds.

"Realistically I'm not too sure if we can be up to speed by game one, to be honest, we would like to think that we could be, but we do have to acknowledge we have a lot of work to do," said Taurua, who has several new faces in her side this season.

Thunderbirds coach Jane Woodlands-Thompson does admit, though, it has been her most challenging preseason in her four seasons in charge.

"We've missed three weeks of preseason of the contracted period and three weeks of the actual season, so we're six weeks down on what we're normally able to achieve," she said.

"So we had to think very carefully with our conditioning programme and how we are going to manage that, whether we try to fit it all in to the shortened timeframe or whether we just taper it a little bit, and in the end we came up with a bit of a hybrid solution."