Magic's Casey Kopua in action during ANZ Champs. Photo / Michael Bradley
Acloud of negativity hovers over New Zealand netball as Waimarama Taumaunu this week prepares to name her Silver Ferns line-up for the World Cup.
Team naming functions are generally a time of great optimism, a time of bold proclamations about being ready to foot it with the world's best and, if all goes to plan — fingers crossed, touch wood and all those other phrases sportspeople offer in an effort not to tempt fate — they will come away with the title.
This year, there is a sense of foreboding around the entire exercise. It is hard to remember a period when there has been more pessimism surrounding the sport in New Zealand.
Collectively, the Kiwi teams have just come off the worst ANZ Championship season in eight years, with a New Zealand side winning just one of the 27 transtasman clashes this year. The previous worst result for New Zealand was six wins a season, which occurred three times — 2008, 2009 and 2013 — and all were considered appalling seasons.
The old argument 'we need only seven players to compete with Australia' is of little comfort, either. The Ferns are on the brink of matching their longest losing streak against the Diamonds with nine straight defeats to their transtasman rivals.
Last year, they lost their five meetings by an average of 12 goals as injuries exposed a glaring lack of depth in the Ferns shooting stocks.
The allowance of imports in the transtasman league has created positional shortages to the extent last season Taumaunu was starting with players such as Bailey Mes and Ameliaranne Wells who could not get court time at ANZ Championship level.
How did it get to this point? In a word, inertia.
New Zealand netball got a rude awakening when the ANZ Championship kicked off eight years ago. The Silver Ferns' ability to match it with Australia at international level tricked many into thinking that a trantasman league would also be fought on equal footing.
The Ferns may have been able to rustle up seven players to give Australia a run for their money (well, most of the time), but finding 60 elite players to take on Australia's best proved a whole different ball game.
The Kiwi sides were out-run, out-muscled and outclassed by the fitter, faster and better-prepared Australian sides.
Yet New Zealand coaches and administrators were remarkably relaxed about the situation. "It will just take a bit of time," they soothed. Young players just weren't accustomed to the speed, intensity and physicality of the Australian style of play — nor had they been conditioned for it.
The common thinking at the time was that, with further exposure to the Aussie style and more emphasis on strength and conditioning, our girls would catch up.
Some strong performances by the Silver Ferns on the international stage also helped paper over the cracks early on.
The New Zealand team were still able to foot it with Australia at test level, and even had some big wins, demolishing them by 16 goals in their final meeting of 2009 and 19 goals in a test in Wellington in 2010 before claiming gold at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi later that year.
But as the elite game was speeding towards professionalism, the development pathways to get players to that point were left in a shabby state of disrepair.
With the transtasman competition essentially replacing the old National Bank Cup, New Zealand were left without a meaningful domestic competition.
The gap in competition, combined with ad hoc high performance systems throughout the regions has resulted in the competitive gulf that now exists between New Zealand and Australia.
'It is clear we have missed a beat in terms of developing our system for sustained development of players and coaches," said Netball New Zealand chief executive Hilary Poole.
"We haven't made the investment the Australians have in their system to keep up with their progress."
That realisation has come after hundreds of hours of painstaking reviews and consultation work undertaken at both national and zonal level since Poole stepped into the job 18 months ago.
As revealed in the Herald in October last year, the outcome of those reviews saw the development of three key strategies: further investment in the national player development programme, a new streamlined high-performance plan to be implemented in the zones and the establishment of a new domestic league by 2016.
Nine months on and those strategies are all in various stages of execution.
The most immediate change was the creation of a new national development squad, encompassing the New Zealand A and under-21 sides, headed by former Northern Mystics assistant Kiri Wills.
Wills believes the rebirth of the New Zealand A programme in particular will play a key role in building depth at national level as it exposes the next tier below the Silver Ferns to international competition.
The New Zealand A team, who will also be named on Thursday, will travel to Sydney in the lead-up to the World Cup to play a series of practice games against the visiting international sides.
"NZ A used to be a big programme and it has kind of dropped off the radar so we are trying to get that up and running again," Wills said. "It's about making sure they're aware we are invested in their future."
Work is also well under way in ironing out the details of the new domestic competition to start next year and Poole said she hopes to have the shape and format finalised by August.
"There is a yawning gap in our competitions structure between what sits underneath the ANZ Championship and age-group level, and we need to plug that gap," said Poole.
"We have strong commitment here from Netball NZ to make it work and we have a preferred model in mind, which we are currently doing the feasibility work on and presenting to our stakeholders."
While she can't reveal the exact shape the new league will take or how many teams will be involved, Poole is clear it will need to have no age restriction, unlike the short-lived under-23 competition introduced a few years back, and it needs to run over a series of weeks and months rather than in tournament form.
As former Silver Fern Adine Wilson points out, funding a new competition and getting it off the ground will be tricky, but the real challenge for the national body is creating a clear and consistent high performance plan that can be delivered by the often under-resourced zones.
It is perhaps reassuring, then, that particular burden rests on the rather burly shoulders of Steve Lancaster, Netball NZ's high performance manager.
Lancaster, a former Crusaders lock who switched from the second row to the franchise's front office, joined Netball NZ in January this year following a two-year stint with Rugby Canada. He has a daunting task trying to streamline the various programmes being delivered around the country into one clear, consistent system. But he is buoyed by one fact — the numbers.
Away from the high performance end, the story is positive for netball. Player numbers have been increasing year-on-year, with registration figures putting netball as the second-most popular sport in the country behind rugby, according to a Sport NZ participation survey. Netball NZ are anticipating another big jump in registrations when the the latest figures are released next month.
"We have a really strong base, and that is a massive asset to the sport," Lancaster said. "We need to make sure that is funnelling through to a really high peak in terms of international performance."
Lancaster is revising Netball NZ's high performance strategy, which will see the impetus for player and coach development shift from a nationally-driven system to being delivered by the zones.
"We can't sit here [at Netball NZ] on Parnell Road and think we're going to deliver player and coach development nationally. We need the zones to be doing a good job of that and that's the big area of focus for us. So it's about providing the framework and resourcing to deliver that and making sure those people in the zones understand where they fit into the national system."
Lancaster estimates it will take three to four years for the initiatives the national body are pushing through to have a noticeable impact.
"I'd think we'd see the fruits of those plans within the next four-year cycle. By the time we are getting into [the World Cup in] 2019 in Manchester, we would need to be seeing some outputs from our strategy."
That will be little comfort to Taumaunu as she looks ahead to the World Cup in six weeks, when the Silver Ferns will face a major battle just to reach the final.
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