Netball Central - Coaching

Zones

Netball Central's Ngarama Milner-Olsen was quick to acknowledge a cast of many after taking out the National Netball League (NNL) Coach of the Year title at the 2023 New Zealand Netball Awards.

Performance Coach Development

In 2016 of NCZ’s four ANZ and Central Manawa coaches, only one, Yvette McCausland Durie, had a NNZ coach qualification. In 2023 that has changed and today all our coaches are qualified to or on the PCQ pathway.

We have appointed Anna Andrews to the Pulse Head Coach role for 2024 and we will support her by appointing an Assistant Coach with complementary skills and expertise. We will continue to appoint specialist coaches to work with the Pulse and Central Manawa campaigns in the areas of shooting, mid court and circle defence. Additionally, we will invite guest coaches to add their expertise to our campaigns too.

In the NNL space, we will appoint two Central Manawa Assistant Coaches, one of whom will be based outside Wellington to ensure we spread NNL campaign expertise across the Zone. This will take the number of coaches directly involved in the two Zone campaigns to five, up from four in 2019.

In the Emerging Talent space, we will build a pool of coaches with the game knowledge, experience, capability and desire to step into the ANZ Premiership. We will continue to work closely with NNZ to support the implementation of the PCQ programme, closely supporting a small number of coaches each year to complete the course. And, where we see opportunity, we will seek to identify and fast track high potential coaches into PCQ. To support this work we will re-establish the PCQ coach cohort and work to grow the opportunities available to our next tier of coaches. Each year we will aim to produce 2 new PCQ coaches, offering support in observations, producing personal development plans, communicating with NNZ and offering at least 3 Zone led development opportunities per annum. And we will continue to deploy all our identified coaches into Centre Tournament opportunities and the Advanced Camp.

Accordingly, NCZ will continue to ensure performance coach opportunities are developed and implemented within the NCZ suite of programmes to ensure that we have a surfeit of appropriately skilled home grown coaches for our next recruitment processes.

Zone Selectors

The Zone has appointed a Head of Selectors (HoS) who has been available to help Centres in their selection work. In this four year cycle, we will continue to grow a network of selectors who select and de-select at every level of the Centre representative programmes and who support the Head of Selectors in the zone performance programme.

The role of the selector network will continue to be to give life to the NCZ performance plan by selecting the best athletes into our teams and squads thereby ensuring our squads and teams enjoy the highest levels of success.

Budget permitting, we will strive to have an NCZ selection presence at all national domestic events – age groups, schools and any other events. This will allow us to keep an eye on the movement of our players in and out of our programmes; through our programmes; and in and out of the Zone.

Umpire Development

NCZ has a comprehensive strategy to ensure we continue to dominate the performance umpire space. In 2023 we have 4 International Umpire Award holders, 6 umpires in the national squad, 4 umpires in the national watchlist and 2 national umpire coaches/selectors. To ensure we maintain this level of representation we focus our support on umpires who have potential to be selected for NNZ Open Championships and NNZ U18 Championship by selecting these umpires into two squads. The squads each have an annual programme which is delivered by 5 umpire coaches. The focus of these programmes is based on the 5 Pillars of Performance; Tactical, Technical, Mental, Physical and Management, to develop umpires who have on and off court skills to succeed nationally.

Alongside the umpire programme we have implemented an Emerging Coach programme to ensure we have coaches who have the skills to support our umpires, and to create succession into national coach positions.

NCZ works with centres to create umpire development programmes that will feed umpires into our squads, and to ensure that centres have appropriately qualified umpires for their representative programmes. Additionally, we support representative umpires through ensuring we have umpire coaches at local representative tournaments to identify and coach umpires towards zone squad selection.

NZSS Programme

The NCZ NZSS development programme is an identification and development programme that provides fitness testing, feedback, sport science education and some programme support for promising secondary school players during the off season. It is designed to prepare participants for the NNZ Development Camp and the upcoming season.

The programme starts in October with tournament play where the most promising players are identified for further development; this is followed by an Advanced Camp for those identified players; and ends with a January camp led by Netball New Zealand.

The tournament play is led by the participating Centres with implementation support from NCZ; the Advanced Camp is led by NCZ; and the January camp is implemented by Netball New Zealand.

The programme commences with Centre’s, in consultation with NCZ, selecting and preparing teams to compete in cross-Zone tournaments. At these tournaments NCZ selectors work with Centre selectors to decide which athletes might participate in the Advanced Camp.

The final list of athletes to be invited to the Advanced Camp will be decided by the NCZ Head of Selectors. These athletes will be provided strength & conditioning programmes and expert coaching to help them prepare for the national development camp in January. All participating athletes will receive a completed NCZ player profile detailing their achievement against the NCZ performance standards.

This is a de-centralised programme and NCZ contact with these athletes is limited. Therefore, Centres are strongly encouraged to add their support and encouragement to these young athletes during their preparation phase.

Successful NZSS athletes will be required to pay the full costs of any ongoing camps or competitions, should they be selected for the final NNZ NZSS team. Centres are encouraged to work closely with any athletes who do win national selection to ensure they can meet the additional financial obligations that will arise.

Performance Programmes in Centres

Recognising the ongoing success of Netball Wellington Centre’s performance programme, NCZ will continue to pursue the implementation of similar programmes in the other lead Centres, Netball Manawatu, Netball Taranaki and Netball Hawkes Bay. We will support all four of our lead Centres to create and/or continue their own high performance programmes, which identify and develop their best young players. NCZ will help each lead Centre to achieve this by providing advice, guidance, regular visits and guest coaches when available.

Each performance programme will be tailored to be fit for purpose for the respective Centre taking advantage of the fact that each one has excellent leaders to provide support to their Centre programmes:

Netball Wellington Centre: Sandra Edge
Netball Hawkes Bay: Charissa Barham and Irene van Dyk
Netball Taranaki: Jaqua Pori-Makea-Simpson
Netball Manawatu: Ashleigh Kate Araroa and Renee Matoe

This programme is an opportunity to grow the capacity of our lead Centres to implement performance programmes that will in turn underpin the Zone performance programme and grow our cohort of emerging, talented secondary school players.

We will also support the smaller Centres with their performance programmes, upon request in a bespoke, mutually beneficial way that makes the most effective and efficient use of our combined resources.

Centre Age-grade Representative Programmes

NCZ recognises that Centres are largely staffed by volunteers and so additional work in the performance player development area is difficult to achieve. Therefore, NCZ’s approach in this space will be to continue to support all Centres with specific resources to help them enhance their current and ongoing representative team programmes. In working in this way Centres will be contributing to the Zone’s overarching performance objectives without adding tasks to their already crowded calendars.

Centre representative team programmes are short campaigns that commence in April with trials and end with the national or pinnacle tournament event sometime in July.

NCZ will provide all Centres with a set of resources that could be used in conjunction with their representative teams. These resources include the following –

Sample annual calendar detailing what events should take place and when
NCZ age appropriate player profile
NCZ age appropriate player training diary
Sample selection policy
Sample trial team list schedule to record player positions and quarters
Simple analysis tool
Simple campaign evaluation tool
‘Slack’ contact tool

There is no expectation that Centres will use all or any of these tools. They are simply made available for Centre use to help in the development of performance players.

NCZ will provide ongoing support around these tools for all Centres through the Emerging Talent Manager, who supports our Centres to assess, feedback and develop their athletes and coaches. We achieve this by regularly and consistently deploying our Emerging Talent Manager into Centres; by developing, reviewing, updating and distributing appropriate resources annually and by inducting Centre volunteers and staff in how to use them; and by deploying our Emerging Talent Manager into tournaments to support and mentor coaches as they are coaching.

We also work with Centres to provide ongoing support for those athletes who are identified to progress further along the performance pathway. We engage with Centres to help them support their identified athletes, with the goal of getting those athletes selected into NNZ programmes.

We will support Centre representative team managers too, with tailored development opportunities to address identified manager needs.

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