Whole new ball game
From netball to volleyball, they’re chasing Aussie glory
IT is a big day for former netball rivals Sarah Strong and Aimee Coleman.
The pair decided to join forces by switching to volleyball at the start of last year to become integral members of the Queensland under-17 side gunning for glory this morning.
Strong, 16, Coleman, 16, and fellow Gold Coaster Kara Inskip, 15, are in the Queens- land side who have sailed through undefeated to the Australian Junior Volleyball Championships gold medal match at Coomera Indoor Sports Centre.
The team had a similarly successful run through the group stage in the 2015 tournament in Canberra before slumping to third overall, leaving them hungry for more this time around.
“We really want to fight back and win for sure this time,” Strong said.
Later, the trio will head to Brisbane as part of the Queensland Pirates squad for Australian Volleyball League season-opening matches against the Canberra Heat tonight and tomorrow.
“We’ll probably be on the bench because we have had a long week,” Strong said.
She admitted she took a while to warm to volleyball despite her mother and father both playing the sport, the latter representing Australia in the 1980s.
“Both my parents used to play volleyball but I was never really super into it, I never tried it or anything like that,” she said.
“At the start of last year I started trialling for a whole bunch of different things and same with Aimee as well.
“We actually played against each other at netball, we played for different clubs. Then we decided to move over to volleyball and pretty much went through all the trials for the state academy program and all that kind of stuff and eventually got to make the junior Australian squad.”
A key goal is to be part of the trimmed 12-strong national squad that will travel to Thailand in April for the Asian Junior Volleyball Championship.
During the week, the Coomera centre has hosted many hundreds of competitors across male and female under-15s, under-17s and under-19s divisions.