Late bloomer Chauke ready for Poteas’ bench
IT TAKES a special woman to be a single mother and work as hard as Dumisani Chauke to fulfil her dreams.
The national under-21 women’s netball team assistant coach spends a lot of her time away from home, but her four-year-old son, young as he is, seems to understand that mommy has to go to work.
“He sort of understands when I tell him that I am going away. He asks: ‘for 100 weeks?’. It’s not easy, but you make it work.
“The support I have from my siblings is amazing. They look after him while I am away and they entertain him. What I do is try to keep contact with my son and my family everyday.”
But the time Chauke, 30, is spending away from home is not in vain.
She will get an opportunity to be on the coaching bench with Spar Proteas’ head coach Norma Plummer for the England leg of the SANZEA quad series this weekend.
And then in July, the Under21s will be playing at the World Youth Netball Championships in Botswana.
For someone who retired from playing in 2014, Chauke is progressing extremely well as a coach, starting at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth to where she is now.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think a 30-year-old Dumisani would be sitting on the bench of the Proteas national team as an assistant coach. “It’s an awesome experience, honour and privilege that not many 30-year-old coaches around the world get to enjoy,” said Chauke. “Every coach’s dream is to coach a [senior] national team. This is the perfect time for me to learn, to be prepared for when that opportunity presents itself. Hopefully one day, God willing, it will happen.” The former SA player admits she was at first “terrible” at netball in primary school. She did, however, go on to become a star in high school, though her parents were not quite convinced that a career could be made out of the sport. “Netball started in Malamulele for me. I did not really like it. I preferred soccer and basketball and volleyball. “One day when my school was playing, my teacher said ‘come help us out’. I said ‘but I hate netball’. I played and the rest is history. “When I got to matric and told my parents I wanted to study sports management, they were against it. They had questions like ‘how are you going to make money from sports?’ But I stuck to it because it’s my passion. They started warming up and now tell me of how proud they are of me due to my talent and passion.”