Super Netball with August start aims to be ‘truly national’

Australia’s netball leadership is hopeful a Super Netball season launch in August will allow for a truly national competition.

Super Netball CEO Chris Symington has not ruled out fans attending games.

Australia’s netball leadership is hopeful that a Super Netball season launch in August will allow for a truly national competition to be held, with teams in Adelaide and Perth allowed to train and play at home unlike their AFL counterparts.

“We’ve picked a window where we feel like we’ve given ourselves every possibility to run a fly-in, fly-out season, so that we can go into all the states and venues that we have as part of our calendar. However if that’s not the case we’ve got contingency plans to mitigate that,” said league chief executive Chris Symington.

Netball Australia announced on Sunday the 2020 Super Netball Season, originally scheduled to start in May, would instead begin on August 1. The league has committed to a full 60-match season and Symington said the preferred plan is to stick to a weekly fixture.

That would mean a season stretching into late November, leaving December as the only option for a four-Test series between Australia and New Zealand. Netball Australia confirmed on Sunday that while the trans-Tasman Constellation Cup will be held this year, a Quad Series tournament including South Africa and England was not possible given travel restrictions.

NSW Swifts players and staff celebrate after winning the 2019 Super Netball grand final against Sunshine Coast Lightning. Picture: AAP

Symington said that the 2020 Super Netball fixture will be announced in a series of chunks to give the league flexibility to respond to changing lockdown guidelines. The first phase of that announcement is expected by late June.

There are a range of contingencies currently built into the league’s planning, including the idea of mini-hubs if state border restrictions have not softened by August.

Critics have speculated that housing teams interstate was a financially impossible option for netball, but Symington insisted that Netball Australia has a viable model prepared if need be.

Some form of fan attendance has not been ruled out for the upcoming season, and the league is confident that it can play games in larger venues if restrictions around crowds are eased, and said that teams have identified smaller, more affordable stadium options as a back-up plan.

Super Netball players are currently training on a limited basis, and have taken substantial pay cuts. Symington said that some cuts will likely remain in place for the remainder of the year.

“I think the reality is that everyone has been impacted by this in some way shape or form, and obviously the players have been great in terms our negotiations up until this point,” he said.

“And we’re very close to finalising what that looks like for the rest of the season. I think in line with the rest of the system we can assume that there’s going to be some kind of pay reduction.”