Netball Talent to Trial for NZ Secondary Schools Team

Exciting Young Netball Talent Selected to Trial for NZ Secondary Schools Team

Media Release

20 December 2013

Netball New Zealand is pleased to announce the secondary school players selected to trial for the New Zealand Secondary Schools (NZSS) Netball team in April 2014.

The players invited to trial are:

Marianne Delaney will coach the NZSS side with Julie Seymour in the assistant coach role.

There are still a few spots left open for those players needing to work on certain aspects of their game and those players will know if they’ve been selected to trial by the end of February.

Coach Marianne Delaney says it will be a difficult job choosing the final squad with such a gifted group of players to choose from.

“It’s always a challenge to whittle down a collection of talented players into a team of just 12, but we simply can’t select everyone.”

“Each player will be given an equal opportunity to secure a spot in the NZSS team and if they give their best, that’s all we can hope for,” she said.

New Zealand is fortunate to have a wealth of talented young Netball players to choose from, with the bulk of triallists impressing selectors at the recent training camp in Cambridge earlier this month. Those attending impressed NNZ Emerging Talent Selector’s over the past 12 months at the NZ Secondary Schools Netball Championships in Auckland in October or the NZ Age Group Netball Championships U17 tournament earlier this year in the Hawkes Bay.

Trials for the NZSS team will be held in Auckland in mid-April after which 12 players plus up to four non-travelling reserves will be named. The squad will attend one two-day camp in Auckland in before the NZSS team heads to Adelaide in May 2014 to compete in the Trans-Tasman Secondary Schools Netball Tournament.

Delaney said it never ceases to amaze her how fortunate New Zealand is to have such a raft of exceptionally talented players in secondary schools throughout the country.

“We’ve watched a lot of Netball over the past 12 months and we’re pretty excited about the future of Netball in this country."

“Our challenge is to make sure we select the players we feel will add to the team environment and play their best each time they take the court.”

“For a lot of these players, their dream is to play for the Silver Ferns one day, so this is the first step in making that dream a reality,” she said.

“I’m excited, New Zealand are the defending champions of the Trans-Tasman tournament and we want to bring home the gold medal, so Julie and I start that process now by choosing players who are ready to step up to the next level.”

ENDS

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