Youth Netball

On Saturday morning I was also able to attend a girl's netball game. The girls that I was watching were twelve years old and the teams they were members of were club teams. Coming from playing basketball all my life, I found netball to be very slow moving. In many ways it was similar to basketball but the main differences were that you cannot dribble the ball, as soon as you catch it you choose a pivot foot and cannot move, there is no backboard, and you have to stay an arms length away from the person with the ball. I think if I tried to play I would be thrown out for being too aggressive! While there is strategy to passing in the game, I felt like there was not much room to really display much skill in the game. I was also surprised by how often the ball went into the hoop when the girls shot the ball. This meant there was little rebounding that occurred which I would think must be very boring for the girls who were playing goal defender. While it seemed like the girls were enjoying themselves, it did not seem like they were very competitive about the game. Similar to the rugby game, the parents seemed to be enjoying themselves socializing on the side and from my experience they were only yelling out words of encouragement.