Top season for young netballers
It has been a season of success for Porirua’s Northern United Junior A netball team.
The team competed in the Hawke’s Bay Tournament in Hastings on June 25, placing fifth out of eight teams, and placed fifth in the year eight development pool at the 2017 New World Intermediate Championships in Palmerston North on July 9.
They also placed third in the year eight grade in the 2017 Wellington Regional Centres Combined Year 7 and 8 Tournament in Hataitai on July 23.
Despite winning all of their games and having the most total points, with 20, at the end of the Wellington tournament, the team was ineligible for first place as they were an invitational team.
Coach Nane Lilo said the success of the 10-person squad at the event was acknowledged by the captain of the first-placed Hutt Valley team.
‘‘We can’t officially win, but every single team that we played, we went undefeated. So we played all those rep teams in the Wellington region and we beat all of them.
‘‘The girls love that. They love the fact that we didn’t officially win but everyone knows who won – it was a club team,’’ she said.
When the Kapi Mana Netball Centre discontinued the year seven and eight representative teams this year, Lilo, along with her husband Serge and Rebecca Ngarimu, stepped in to create a club team.
Lilo said as she and Ngarimu both had daughters on the team, they felt it was important to give their children an opportunity to succeed in the competitive side of the sport outside of regular Saturday games.
‘‘We went out and we hit up all the netball centres that have representative tournaments and actually asked if we could be an invitational team to give the girls that further development,’’ she said.
Serge Lilo, a former Hurricanes player, set up an agility boot-camp training routine for the players.
The team has one final tournament for the season in Levin in early September, but Nane Lilo hoped the girls who will be attending high school next year would continue to come together every week for agility training.