Is the Super Shot the rule tweak that will save netball?

Gretel Tippett shoots a Super Goal in an Australia-South Africa Fast5 match

So you thought you weren’t interested in netball. Super Netball is rebooting this weekend and you weren’t planning to bother too much about watching.

It’s netball right? It’s interesting once every four years at the Commonwealth Games — and maybe when the Diamonds win a World Championship.

Except maybe, just maybe, that’s all about to change. Maybe you are about to discover an interest in netball.

Remember when you were growing a little tired of rugby league and then Peter V’landys introduced the six-again rule in time for the season reboot and NRL was suddenly faster and more spectacular and you couldn’t look away.

Or when 16-minute quarters were introduced as the AFL wrestled with a disrupted, compressed season and everything was suddenly quicker and a little different, with unexpected results and new heroes.

OK, so they brought in some new rules in rugby and nothing changed. But you get my drift — little tweaks to the rules can make a sport exciting all over again.

Super Netball returns on Saturday afternoon with a clash between the Queensland Firebirds and the Sunshine Coast Lightning — and the teams get to be the first to try out a rule tweak that could be a game-changer for netball.

Queensland Firebirds players Kim Jenner, Lara Dunkley and Rudi Ellis will help get the new Super Netball season underway. Picture: Tara Croser

After tryouts in Fast5 tournaments and a bushfire relief match earlier this year, the two-point Super Shot is coming to Super Netball. It’s the netball equivalent of basketball’s three-pointer, shot from outside the circle and worth twice as much as a normal, run-of-the-mill goal.

The Super Shot will come into play in the last five minutes of each quarter and must be put up by a goal attack or goal shooter in a designated arc from at least 1.9m away from the post, on the edge of the circle.

Netball purists apparently hate the idea. On the sidelines of netball courts across the nation, rusted-on fans have expressed their shock at this crass assault on tradition. And players are up in arms, claiming they should have been consulted before such a radical change was introduced.

Netball Scoop, a website for true believers, lashed out at the Super Netball commission when the rule change was announced, tweeting: “This is a group of people who seemingly don’t care one little bit what their regular fans want … the people who’ve supported netball through thick and thin, year after year. They’re more worried about trying to attract people who have no interest in the game at all.”

Super Netball chair Marina Go, one of the people behind the Super Shot, probably doesn’t disagree. She makes no secret of wanting to appeal to a wider audience. The people who have “supported netball through thick and thin” will always be there. Go and Super Netball CEO Chris Symington are out to attract the rest of us.

Diamonds goalshooter Caitlin Bassett with a more traditional set shot

Go says she is “trying to grow the league’s fan base to attract more revenue so that one day we might be able to achieve gender pay equity for our incredible athletes. That’s the goal.”

So is the Super Shot netball’s six-again? It’s hard to know until we see it in action, but there’s a good chance.

To start with, it’s a new skill — shooters will need to revise their techniques to score from long-range, defenders will have a wider area to police. And it will open up more attacking space — defenders who double up on a sharpshooter under the ring could find themselves beaten from the Super Shot arc.

Watching a shooter lob one in from a couple of metres is, by its very nature, more exciting than the usual fare of a beanstalk standing directly under the ring and gently flipping the ball.

And with two points at stake for a Super Shot, teams who go behind will be a chance of pulling it back in the last five minutes.

Personally, I don’t watch a lot of netball as a rule. I’m a Commonwealth Games and World Championships kind of fan.

But I am probably just the sort of fan Marina Go is chasing. So she will no doubt be pleased to learn that I will be having a look this weekend to check out what the new-look, longshot Super Netball has to offer.