Netball: Only as good as your last game

Yvonne Willering talks about the tough, exciting - and brutal world of international netball with DITA DE BONI Dita De Boni.

One month after her shock sacking, Silver Ferns coach Yvonne Willering is one year older and still reeling. Not that she's aged a whole year in a month. Instead, she celebrated her 52nd birthday this week and at home in Henderson is contemplating her future, a process that still includes sadly dissecting her days with New Zealand's premier netballers.

Immediately it is clear that this is a woman grieving - netball was a major part of her life, and now, like a beloved partner, the game and one of its most passionate devotees have been torn asunder.

Not that she isn't being brave about what happened. She precludes two things from her conversation: "sour grapes" and talking about the personalities responsible for her recent split with Netball New Zealand.

The Yvonne Willering who emerges in discussion is one who is rarely given too many column centimetres. One might think before meeting her that she'd be grim-faced, stern or scary, like the visage she often presents on television. Certainly she displays all of these characteristics - one friend says she can be a "bloody dragon at times" - but the day the Herald calls she is mostly friendly, funny and hospitable, if not a straight talker.

Perhaps the apparent contradiction in her personality can be explained by the fact that she is - like most professional sportspeople - singularly focused on winning, the team and its performance. Throughout the conversation, Willering slips into talking about the Ferns as if she is still coach, watching all seven positions like an eagle from the sidelines. She will probably keep watching the team, but admits it will be hard.

"My passion for the sport won't change, but it will be difficult, because you tend to form a bond with the players. It doesn't matter what the future holds, what I had was very important to me and it's not something you can just let go of."

Roughly one month ago, Willering received a call from Netball New Zealand chief executive Shelley McMeeken and had a sinking feeling her second interview to renew her job with the Ferns had gone as badly as she'd suspected.

"I had warning, but I sort of hoped I had read it wrong, hoped that I'd been reading things into the situation - but once I walked through the door [of Netball New Zealand's offices] I knew. Having said that, for days afterwards you still think 'this can't be true'."

Both Willering and Netball New Zealand confirm that Willering was dropped for what was perceived to be inconsistencies in the Fern's performance against Australia, that she "couldn't take the next step up with the team", but it's a summation Willering rejects.

"I find it quite interesting that during my era as coach we played Australia 14 times - which has never happened under any other coach, and it's a hell of a lot of games. Initially when I took on the job [in 1997] it was a question of 'how close can we get to Australia?', and the expectation was that we could get within 10-12 goals of them. And now, obviously the team has improved, expectations have changed as well - now we're expected to win each time ... every time you play Australia your reputation is on the line.

"Because you look at it and you say, in our last six outings with Australia, they've won three and we've won three. Their coach gets support when they get a loss and it's seen as a temporary setback, but when we get a loss we go into total re-evaluation and we're totally negative in our outlook."

Willering herself, while admitting to being a person who is constantly reviewing things, never had any doubt that she led a winning team. This eternal optimism and belief in the Ferns stemmed in part, perhaps, from her total belief in herself and her own performance. She says right from when she was a teenager she never bothered with things she couldn't do well, and when it came to sport in particular, that wasn't much.

Willering emigrated to New Zealand with her parents and brother from Holland when she was 8, and still speaks with a slight Dutch lilt.

From the beginning the strange new country proved challenging. The boat that brought the Willerings to New Zealand was beset with typhoid, and her parents had to go into quarantine for some time on arrival.

Highly qualified in his native country, Willering's father couldn't speak English and had to take a lower-ranked job than the one he left in Holland.

Yvonne Willering attended Rutherford High School in Te Atatu, where the naturally gifted athlete was introduced to netball by June Mariu, a former New Zealand representative player. In her first year of play, Willering, a tall and talented goal defence, made the Auckland under-21 team. At the same time as playing representative netball, she finished school and trained as a medical laboratory technologist, a job she kept many years into her netball career.

"It was a totally different game then - gym frocks, stockings, different off the court and on. Expectations were different as well - everyone wanted to win but there was more togetherness.

"I think the game wasn't so fast in those days, it was a different style of game too, a game for the ladies, rather than a sport. It was about how you wore your tie - and that's not really what it's about now, is it?"

Between 1968 and 1972, Willering played with the Auckland seniors before leaving on her OE, travelling Europe, and revisiting Holland, before ending up in Canada, a country she loved and one where she continued to teach netball, even though the natives had hardly heard of the game.

It did not occur to her, she says, not to keep trying to play for New Zealand's national netball team, even though she had tried for the team and missed out once already in 1971. In 1974, soon after she returned, she tried again, made it in, staying with the team for 10 years before being dropped in 1983, another move she says she did not see coming.

Unlike the present situation, which sees Willering almost cut adrift from netball (the announcement coming just before Christmas, she's having a hard time mapping out her work while everyone is on holiday), after being cut from the national team she went straight into coaching other teams, and playing in and coaching the Auckland provincial side.

One player who had Willering as coach during those early years is netball commentator Julie Coney, who describes her as "tough but fair".

"She certainly had high expectations and expected her players to work hard and have high standards, and we had a winning team as a result. We had enormous respect for her and we also respected our teammates, an attitude I think has changed over the years."

Willering thinks she has become a bit harder since those early years, something her acquaintances and friends concur with. "You do change over time, as a coach I have changed, I've certainly toughened up. You still care what people say and think but you also get to a stage where if you take notice of everything that's said you can't make good judgment calls anymore."

Still, she says, cutting players is hard because she feels for the players who have been left out. "I'll do the job and come up with the goods because that's part of it, but it doesn't make it any easier, and also because you've been there yourself."

Coming up with the goods was what Willering had to do in 1997, when she was appointed caretaker coach of the Ferns after the abrupt sacking of then-coach Leigh Gibbs (which had followed the sacking of Lynn Parker in 1993 for - in a portent of things to come - her perceived inability to take on Australia).

Both Willering and Gibbs are reluctant to discuss the event, although it was again considered in '97 that Gibbs' team could not beat Australia consistently enough. Gibbs says she left as coach for "completely different" reasons from Willering, but pays tribute to her successor.

"I certainly do feel empathy with her - no one wants to be in that position. I can relate to her disappointment. I hope she's not lost to the game."

What is clear is that Willering inherited a team divided over the sudden loss of Gibbs. And one that, on more than one occasion, was divided over Willering. A particularly sticky time came when the Ferns lost - by that damned one goal - to Australia in the World Champs in '99. Willering does not like the term "player revolt", which was bandied about at the time, but admits the loss caused much soul-searching, from both the players and herself.

She was eventually reappointed and thought she and the team had just started working really well together. But a similar narrow loss at the Fisher & Paykel series last year saw four goals sound the death knell on her career.

Vicki Hearfield, who was a rival coach to Willering in the provincial days and has followed her career, says there was no logical reason for her to be sacked.

"Yvonne's been through some terrible times with the teams and some not-great evaluations, but she's kept giving it her all and has managed to really pull the team together. Ruth [Aitken] has been handed a strong team, which Yvonne has put her all into, and it's currently closer to Australia than it's ever been."

She says the people charged with making decisions don't sometimes understand that while administering the game is like running a business, "coaching is an extension of yourself, and it's not always easy to fit your personality into the corporate mold. Netball New Zealand ... needs to look after its coaches better."

Surprisingly, when the top job came up for renewal this time, the players were not consulted for their usual input, which might explain why several of them publicly rallied in support of Willering after the surprise announcement on December 20.

Jan Lundon, who has been involved in netball almost as long as Willering and was also coached by her, says she would love to work with her again, as she knew how to bring out the best in any players that she coached.

"She was an awesome coach, she gets the results. She can be tough, but she's also down-to-earth and a lot of fun to be with. It's Netball New Zealand's loss."

For the meantime, Willering refuses to discuss her plans, although she hopes to pick up one of her old jobs working for ASB Bank, coordinating its sizeable netball sponsorship programme. She would obviously still love to coach at a high level - potentially hazardous, one would think, if it involved working with Netball New Zealand.

She's happier to discuss her menagerie of animals (which includes rabbits, dogs, goldfish, cats, chickens, pigeons and a donkey). Still hurting, she doesn't like going out in public too much - while obviously touched by an outpouring of support - but relents to take the dogs to the beach in her beach buggy.

The dogs provide a constant friendly companionship against a world turned upside down for Willering. She has shied away from labelling the top tier of the netball world bitchy or catty, but admits she may have missed the gossip or politicking that preceded her tumble from the top.

One can easily imagine Willering - a straight talker - being focused on the team to the exclusion of warning signals.

"It's funny, because at the beginning of the Fisher & Paykel series, I was presented with an award for female coach of the year ... it's interesting how you have to keep those things in perspective because a few months later, I'm no longer the coach," she says wistfully.

"Sometimes people don't quite understand how important it is to keep the recognition in perspective," she says, "because you're only as good as your last game."