WINNER IN THE
WHEN Jennie Kumar first came on as the coach of WGC Sharks, she set out to take her team to a Cairns Netball Division 1 premiership within five years.
The five-year plan was to focus on the club’s players, develop their individual skills and ultimately build a team of women who wanted to play for each other, and were driven to succeed.
She did it in three, as Sharks went through the regular season unbeaten and, save for an embarrassing loss in the semi-final, broke through for their first premiership in a decade after one of the most exciting and dramatic grand finals in recent time – a one-point victory after overtime.
But behind the scenes of the euphoric rise to the championship, Kumar, a wife, mum and grandmother, waged arguably the biggest battle of her life.
Tears welled in Kumar’s eyes as she relived her battle with breast cancer, but the Sharks premiership-winning coach is more thankful than anything.
Thankful to her family, her friends, and the Sharks club, who went out of their way to make sure Kumar was in the best possible position to fight the most important fight of her life.
It was halfway through the 2018 Cairns Netball season that Kumar was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“You know when you watch a movie and it zeroes in on the person and everything else is out of focus? It’s like that when you’re told,” she said.
“I remember getting the scans, and I remember feeling there was something wrong as the radiologist went silent. She went from being really chatty to being quiet.
“She said to me to wait, went