Netball New Zealand admits it has dropped the ball by failing to address the dwindling player depth at the elite level soon enough, contributing to the competitive gulf that has opened up between the Silver Ferns and Australia over the past 12 months.
While New Zealand's depth crisis has been brought to head over the past couple of months, with the Diamonds underlining their dominance with an 18-goal win in the Commonwealth Games final and another big win over the Ferns in last week's Constellation Cup opener, Netball NZ had already undertaken a review of its player development pathways this year.
The findings weren't pretty.
"I think we have missed a beat in terms of developing our system for sustained development of players and coaches," said Netball NZ chief executive Hilary Poole.
"We need to have a much clearer and stronger view on positional succession with having an integrated high performance system between Netball NZ and the zones."
After the review, which was steered by a committee that included High Performance Sport's talent development expert Adrian Blincoe, Silver Ferns coach Waimarama Taumaunu and former player Tania Dalton, the national body has, or is preparing to, put in place a range of new measures aimed at boosting the country's depth, including:
- An overhaul of the national development squad system
- Assisting the zones in improving their development pathways for players in their region, and
- Establishing a new domestic league to underpin the ANZ Championship by 2016.
But Poole warns it will take some time to see the impact of the new initiatives and close the gap on Australia. In other words, there will be more pain to endure yet. Asked what that meant for the Silver Ferns' chances at next year's World Cup, Poole's answer was less than hopeful.
"They will work as hard as they can, and give as much as they can."
Concerns about player depth have been raised for some time now, with the transtasman league's advent in 2008 revealing a significant gap between the quality of Australia's second tier players and New Zealand's. But it was thought the Kiwis just needed time to adjust to the semi-professional environment.
Besides, the Silver Ferns were still performing strongly at international level and were every bit the match for the Diamonds. They even had big wins of their own over Australia, demolishing them by 16 goals in their final meeting of 2009 and 19 goals in a Wellington match in 2010.
But it has become clear that rather than improving New Zealand's depth, the ANZ Championship has instead created positional shortages. In addition, NZ netball did not have the systems in place underneath for sustained player development.
"The feedback we had from the review was it was awesome that we won the 2003 World Cup and the golds in the Melbourne and Delhi Commonwealth Games. But when you win it makes you feel good about yourself and it can sometimes disguise that you've actually got an underlying issue," said Poole.
That has come to a head in the past 12 months as the Ferns slipped off the pace of Australia, and as injuries and player unavailability in the midcourt, and this year the shooting end, brutally exposed NZ's depth crisis.
If you look at the Ferns' present test side, four players - Laura Langman, Leana de Bruin, Casey Kopua and Joline Henry - have played more than 80 tests, whereas the most capped Australian player, midcourter Kim Green, has played just 61. At the same time, NZ have four players who have played fewer than 10 tests - two of those uncapped.
This suggests two things. Once a player has established herself in the Ferns line-up, not a lot of selection pressure is coming from underneath. And when holes are left by retirement or injury, NZ are forced to call on largely untried players to fill the void.
Options were so limited in the shooting end this year that Australian-born shooter Ameliaranne Wells, with just a handful of appearances at ANZ Championship level with the Queensland Firebirds, was rushed straight into the Ferns as soon as her NZ eligibility was discovered.
It was a controversial move, but as Waimarama Taumaunu explained at the time, with imports taking up shooting spots at three of the five New Zealand franchises there was little other option available.
Poole has made it clear changing the import rules in the ANZ Championship is not an option. What Netball NZ need to do is improve development pathways underneath.
The first step has been to broaden the national high performance programme by creating a development squad with its own coach and more opportunities for competition.
Netball NZ will organise more fixtures for an "NZA" team - the first of which will be against the touring English side next month.
But Poole said it was not enough to have only one high performance programme operating in the country - it needs six. Netball NZ is working with each of the five zones to establish clear player development pathways to help the athletes make the transition to the ANZ Championship.
"We see that the zones have got to lead player development and put those pathways in place," said Poole.
"Netball NZ, to be frank, need to provide more leadership and direction to the content of the player development plans to the extent of what we expect players to be capable of doing at each stage."
The final piece of the puzzle will be the establishment of a new domestic league in 2016.
- By Dana Johannsen of the NZ Herald
