Net gains
Netball has finally stepped out of the shadows to become a semi-professional sport. Lisa O'Brien looks at what impact money and media attention will have
As a game of Monday night footy got underway on a cool evening in early April, elsewhere in Sydney an equally fierce battle was being fought between another of the city's teams and their opponents. The crowd of spectators may have been smaller but their passion for the sport was no less intense. The sport was netball and the new team in town, the NSW Swifts, was making their long-awaited debut.
Long seen as the little sister of the Sydney sports codes, in the past year netball has undergone a transformation from awkward adolescent to blossoming young adult.
The Swifts began the new trans-Tasman competition, the ANZ Championship, with a home game against the Southern Steel last month. For the first time, elite netballers in Australia and New Zealand have a semi-professional league with the backing of sponsors and regular telecasts on Fox Sports.
For the Swifts, though, the evolution was not straightforward. When Netball Australia and Netball New Zealand announced the creation of the new competition in March 2007, to be made up of five teams from each country, the state and territory bodies in Australia were invited to submit one team apiece. This posed an instant problem for Netball NSW, who had two successful teams in the existing Commonwealth Bank Trophy - the Sydney TAB Swifts and the McDonald's Hunter Jaegers.
Despite being able to show that NSW alone has more netball participants than the whole of New Zealand, Netball NSW's campaign to retain both teams in the ANZ Championship was ultimately unsuccessful and they were faced with the task of merging the two teams into one.
"I think everyone was really excited but also nervous," says current Swifts goal keeper Emma Koster, who had been playing with the Jaegers for two years. "Because NSW was going to be one team they'd be vying for positions, so there was a bit of both emotions."
Last August, the Sydney Swifts and Hunter Jaegers bid farewell to their home crowds and by December the NSW Swifts were born, with new captain Catherine Cox stepping in to fill the enormous shoes of the recently retired Liz Ellis. For Cox, the recent developments in her sport represent a refreshing change and one that has been a long time coming.
"We should have had a competition like this years ago," she says. "When I first started playing at an elite level I thought that within a couple of years it would be professional but it's taken me playing for 15 years at a top level for it to happen. It's such a good product, it bewilders me sometimes why it took so long."
Significantly, the new semi-professional league comes with semi-professional salaries. While not as hefty as those received by their football counterparts, the new pay packets alone have revolutionised the standard of the competition by allowing players to devote more time and energy to the game.
"There's been so many great players along the way that have got to a point in their lives where they've had to choose between their career and playing netball and a lot of them have given the game away, which is really unfortunate," says Cox. "But the money is going to help alleviate that happening ever again."
Koster used to work up to five days a week as a nurse when playing with the Jaegers, but the new league has allowed her to cut back to three days. "We train so much more because it is that bit more professional. We've got time to train every day and then recover well and travel, so it's definitely made it easier on a lot of girls not having to work as much," she says.
According to Cox, the new level of professionalism in netball has also generated increased media attention.
"The sport is heading in the right direction in terms of coverage and the girls getting names for themselves, which is completely new to us. Media attention at the moment is probably triple or quadruple what we've ever had before, which is fantastic."
Cox acknowledges that increased media coverage could also invite increased scrutiny of the players' private lives, something that they have not had to worry about in the past. So will the new levels of media attention create a 'husbands and boyfriends' phenomenon amongst the partners of the Swifts, in keeping with football's 'WAGs'?
"I can't see it happening for a few years to come but it does get to a point where the paths cross of your private life and your sporting life, you see that happening with some of the football teams," says Cox. "That's a flip side of media that no one loves but certainly if it means we're famous enough that people care about our boyfriends and husbands, bring it on!"
The NSW Swifts play the West Coast Fever in the ANZ Championship on Mon 19 May at the Sydney Olympic Park Sports Centre