Steel learn to master tricky 200km challenge
There is an art to creating a winning professional sporting team – many people throughout the world try to master it.
Southern Steel officials and players fall into that category, and added to their challenge is distance – 200km to be precise.
Six players live in Invercargill, the other four in Dunedin.
Head coach Reinga Bloxham lives in Invercargill, her assistant Lauren Peibenga lives in Dunedin.
So just how do they make it work?
Bloxham says the Steel have been doing it for that long now they don’t view the distance as too much of a dilemma. Planning is the key it seems. ‘‘It can be difficult having a dual base. In an ideal world, it would be nice to have everyone in one spot. It has taken a lot of planning to work out what work’s best for us,’’ Bloxham said.
‘‘In a normal week, if we’ve got a seven day turn around, we’ll have two team trainings and what we would do to reduce the travel is have a back to back.
‘‘We will go [to Dunedin] and train in the afternoon and we stay over and then train in the morning and go home at lunch time.
‘‘So that’s what we do for team trainings. And then we have regional trainings, where each base trains separately and will do speed work and netball specific skills.
‘‘We essentially do the same stuff but at two different bases. All of the gym work and fitness work are done at separate bases as well.
As far Bloxham and Peibenga coaching a team while living 200km apart, Bloxham says it is built around good communication.
‘‘The good thing is our management group is really good at communicating, whether it be by phone, email, text.
‘‘It is just something we have always done so it is just part of our culture. We talk most days and there’s lots of emails go back and forth as well.’’
Culture is a buzz word in modern sport, which basically alludes to if everyone is getting along and buying into working hard and chasing the same goal together.
Building that team camaraderie when the players live in different cities seems like a big mountain to climb.
But it also seems the Steel are as tight as any sporting team.
‘‘We are lucky that the bulk of the players have come back. So we’ve only had to introduce a few new people into our culture and our environment.
‘‘So what we did last year was build up that performance culture and we’ve tried to continue that this year and also put our own spin on it.
‘‘It has been essential for us that this year we’ve been able to build and not rebuild.’’
This week the Steel group will spend a rare week all together.
They travelled to Auckland yesterday for tonight’s game against the Northern Stars.
They will all return to Invercargill tomorrow when they will build towards the Super Sunday round in Invercargill.
The Steel will play the Mystics as part of the triple-header at ILT Stadium Southland on Sunday, before the next night playing the Central Pulse in Invercargill as well.
All up they have a tough schedule of three games in six days ahead of them.
‘‘It’s a huge workload for the girls. We’ve had to think really carefully around the planning to make sure we are giving them optimal rest time, but enough time for us to also do the things we need to do before we hit the next game.’’