The Invercargill-based team has made some cracking starts but has also faded badly during its past three games.
On Sunday, the Steel was trailing the Adelaide Thunderbirds by just three goals with 15 minutes remaining, but fell off the pace and lost the final quarter 19-5.
A week earlier, the Southerners relaxed in the second half and allowed the Central Pulse to salvage some respectability.
And in the second round, against the Waikato-Bay of Plenty Magic, the Steel got into a position to win the game but drifted in the dying stages, losing by six goals.
It is a worrying pattern but Steel strength and conditioning coach Stephen Hill-Haas believes the combined Otago-Southland team is fit despite the trend suggesting otherwise.
"Their overall fitness is of a good standard relative to where they can expect to be at this stage of the season," Hill-Haas said.
"We had an intensive pre-season and one of my main focuses was to improve their aerobic power, which did improve."
However, Hill-Haas has some reservations about the fitness of netballers in general.
He said the game was in its infancy in terms of its professionalism and he believed in time the public could expect to see a different type of athlete emerge.
The sport was in transition from a largely amateur game, where athletes squeezed in training sessions around other commitments, to a semi-professional phase, where the players trained every day.
"This is only the third year of the ANZ Championship and it will evolve," he said.
The South African-born 45-year-old shifted from Australia to Invercargill in January this year on a one-year contract to work with the Steel, and he brings a wide range of experience.
He has a doctorate in sports physiology from the University of Western Australia and spent two years with the South Australia Sports Institute, working mainly with the football programme.
He has spent time in Malaysia, working with the national men's hockey team and also the country's squash players and swimmers.
Basically, he knows his chips.
And from his observations, the Australian netballers are just that little bit more fitter and athletic than the New Zealanders at the moment.
"If you look at the game at the development level in Australia, there is a different type of athlete coming through.
"That may not be just as a result of the training.
"That may be the by-product of a selection process, where they play the game in a certain way which then influences the type of player they select.
"There is no doubt about that because it is across the board.
If you look at the Fever and the Queensland Firebirds, the physiques are quite different from the New Zealand netballers.
"The New Zealand netballers are more power-based athletes.
"They are stronger, they have got more strength, they've got power. But, perhaps, they are less of an aerobic-type athlete.
"And the reality is you can only stretch the elastic band so far in terms of turning a predominantly power-based athlete into a more aerobically powered athlete."
The Steel's next test of its staying power is against the Queensland Firebirds in Invercargill on Monday.
