Ex-Diamond Sharni Layton dances to new beat and loving it

Move over Paul McCartney, Sharni Layton is one of Liverpool’s main attractions this week.

Retired netballer and part-time Collingwood AFLW footballer Sharni Layton. Picture: Michael Klein

Move over Paul McCartney, Sharni Layton is one of Liverpool’s main attractions this week.

Look for the throng of netball fans and the 31-year-old is bound to be at the centre, chatting away between selfies and autographs.

“It’s, like, beautiful,” Layton tells The Australian .

“Nowhere else in the world would that happen, so I’ll soak it up while I can.”

It’s been a year almost to the day since the self-described “netty nerd” hung up her dress for good and swapped it for an AFLW guernsey, but the sport’s most candid cult figure remains exactly that to those who followed her illustrious, boisterous Diamonds career.

Layton is in Beatles territory courtesy of the International Netball Federation, who asked her to speak about athlete wellbeing at their congress and help launch charitable campaign Creating Choices.

She’s also part of Sky Sports’ World Cup punditry team.

This is the first World Cup at which the two-time international player of the year hasn’t been on the court, having featured in Australia’s triumphant 2011 and 2015 campaigns either side of a 2014 Commonwealth Games gold medal.

Of course, Layton was also absent from the 2018 Commonwealth Games, not selected during a leave of absence she later revealed was due to a battle with mental health.

That was the first international tournament that did not feature the uncompromising defender since she made her debut in 2009.

“That was really tough,” she says.

“But I still definitely wasn’t in a good enough head space to be strong enough to make it back for that, and that was quite sad.

“Then when I got back into 2018 pre-season training for Collingwood Magpies I knew in pre-season I was done, to be honest with you, but I didn’t have the heart to tell anyone.

“I wanted to give it a fair crack for the season and about halfway through my mind and my decision hadn’t changed, so that’s when I was comfortable enough to come out and tell everyone else about it.”

At the time the decision shocked just about everyone except those closest to her.

Now she’s “much happier being a human outside of netball”, the semi-professional nature of the AFLW allowing her to train and play for Collingwood but also spend more time with her fiance, family and friends.

It’s a vantage point from which she can observe the Diamonds in action on Merseyside.

Initial thoughts?

“They looked fierce, they looked tanned!” she says, before praising World Cup newcomers Sarah Klau, Jamie-Lee Price and Courtney Bruce.

“I really think the injection of some new players has had a really positive impact on the group.

“It’s been really nice to be on the other side pursuing my career outside of netball.’’

Now she says the world has opened up, even if it is “extremely scary starting from scratch in life as a 31-year-old”.

Layton will start studying personal training at the end of this year and is considering an arts degree in sustainability or environmental science.

The environment is a subject about which she’s ferociously passionate, even by Layton standards.

The other, more recent passion, is mental health awareness, though she’s deliberately limiting how much she speaks about it.

“I’m still working through it myself, and I found that talking about it a lot actually was starting to have a little bit of a detrimental effect on me,” Layton says.

“I’m doing some here and there, but I limit it to like say, one a month or maybe even if that.

“The reason that I talked about it at the congress was because it’s such a huge issue in sport at the moment, and people need to hear it to make change.

“I guess I was one of the strongest characters in netball for a period of time and for them to see that and see that character break down and not be okay is what I believe makes change.

“Depression is not something that just goes away. It’s something that you deal with, it comes back and forth.’’

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH