Netball club celebrates centenary

There was plenty of trips down memory lane as the Collegiate Netball Club marked its 100 years on Saturday.

A dinner at Ascot Park Hotel helped celebrate the century of the club. About 75 past and present members joined together to celebrate the occasion.

With Collegiate being the first club in town netball to celebrate their centenary, this is probably the beginning of recognition of many inspirational women who founded basketball — as it was called back then — in Invercargill and the wider Southland province.

Many club members served on the Southland Association and the club has played a big part in the development of the sport in Southland.

Its most senior life member, Faye Martin, attended the celebrations. She joined the club in 1959.

Games were played at the Southland Girls’ High School gym where the seniors met St Mary’s, the men’s team played an invitational team and the day finished with a mixed-team game.

The Collegiate club was grateful to St Mary’s and the men’s invitational team for being available, particularly as netball had finished for the season. A good afternoon was had by all, with some extremely good netball on display.

Collegiate was the first club to affiliate to the then-Southland Netball Union and have maintained that continuous affiliation.

Founded in 1925, the Collegiate Basketball Club was formed by ex-pupils of Southland Technical College and only those people who attended that secondary school could join.

Each secondary school had their own club and ex-pupils fed into their respective clubs. This all changed in the early 1970s.

Collegiate became the Collegiate Netball Club and in 1972 became the first town club to have an open-door policy and accepted any netball players who wanted to join. In retrospect, a very wise move and other clubs soon followed this policy.

The club has a very strong background with the senior team being the predominant team in the local competitions for many years with club members gaining South Island team (12 players) and Southland Team recognition (17 players).

However the only club player to play for New Zealand was Ethel Neame in the late 1930s.

Life member Doreen Hes was the Southland senior representative coach and selector from 1950-58 and went on to manage the New Zealand team for some years.

Of the 22 captains of the Southland first grade team up to 1961, 12 were Collegiate players.

The club introduced two new trophies for the "players’ player" at their centennial dinner. These trophies acknowledged two life members: Jill Robertson and Angela Francis.

Francis was instrumental in introducing men’s netball to the club, and to the wider Invercargill netball area when she introduced Just for Boyz netball some years ago.— Allied Media