PURPOSE: Netball is the largest team sport in Australia and New Zealand in terms of female participation. Yet there has been a paucity of research conducted, particularly on coaching netball at a community level, which is where most women and girls experience the game. This presentation will discuss, from a practitioner perspective, the author’s experiences of coaching netball teams at top secondary school, representative, and club level, and state level in both New Zealand and Australian contexts, specifically related to the development of team culture and the implementation of various leadership and coaching approaches. The presenter will also share insights for community and high-performance coaches from her doctoral thesis, which investigated the team culture, leadership, and coaching approaches within the Silver Ferns, NZ’s national netball team.

 

METHOD: Implementing an auto-ethnographical approach, personal reflections were recorded via written documents and video analysis, after training sessions, games, and at the conclusion of seasons for teams coached at top secondary school, representative and club, and at state levels within the Australian context, during the 2021-2023 netball seasons. These reflections were then compared to the practitioner’s extensive experience coaching in the NZ netball context.

RESULTS: This comparative approach highlighted significant differences relating to team culture development and awareness. Specifically, the inclusion and acceptance of various ethnicities and cultures within the team environment and gameplay. The concept of winning and how this was interpreted differed significantly. NZ teams were more receptive to an empowering coaching approach compared to the Australian teams who tended to prefer the command style. Utilising a Games Sense approach towards coaching was a new concept to the Australian teams, traditionally dominated by the direct-instruction approach.

CONCLUSION: Australian players were for the most part, open to learning new concepts such as a Games Sense coaching approach and shared leadership. Overall, they were better than NZ players in aspects such as their work ethic and winning mentality. The Australian teams were very receptive of strategies for developing their team culture and learning through an empowering coaching style, however, there were some challenges with this, reverting back to wanting more of a command approach. Implications for future practice include the ability for the author to implement and transfer different strategies learned from coaching both NZ and Australian netball teams in her own high-performance coaching practice, and to also help inform current and future coaches at the community and high performance levels both within New Zealand and Australia.       

 

DISCLOSURE: The author has nothing to disclose