Shooting star: Diamonds captain Caitlin Bassett shoots for netball glory
After the Diamonds' shock loss last year, captain Caitlin Bassett struggled to pick herself up. Now she's back, better than ever.
The day after her unbeatable team lost an unlosable gold medal netball match at last year’s Commonwealth Games, Australian Diamonds captain Caitlin Bassett escaped on her own to sit by a pool in the athlete’s village. She hadn’t been able to sleep since the game; the loss felt so surreal that she’d almost convinced herself that the real final was still to be played the next day. After 12 months obsessing over this tournament, Bassett now felt empty except for gnawing questions. What went wrong? What could we have done differently? “Our focus was winning,” she says. “It was always talking about winning and winning, winning, winning, winning. We’ve never actually talked about what would happen if we didn’t win.”
The Diamonds had every reason to be confident, having torn through the opening two weeks of the Games on the Gold Coast, finishing with 62 goals more than the next best team. Netball experts wondered aloud if this was the best Diamonds team ever assembled. And then they went and lost to England by a single goal in the final.
The next morning, as Bassett gazed into the pool looking for answers, Diamonds coach Lisa Alexander tracked her down. She knew she had to map out a path forward for the heartbroken team. Alexander has built an era of remarkable success on relentless work and an obsession with professionalism. She thought the team should harness its frustration, learn from it, and focus on the 2019 Netball World Cup. The captain disagreed. “I was like, ‘Man, this is still so raw and so fresh’. It was literally like flicking over to the next thing. I said we need to talk about this, and we need to debrief from this. Otherwise, it’s going to be really hard for the girls moving forward.”
Netball Australia offered the group support and the opportunity to debrief with the high performance manager, Stacey West, but the captain’s words were prophetic: most of the squad struggled for form as a new season began in Super Netball, Australia’s premier league. Bassett and her fellow Diamond Steph Wood returned to duties at the Sunshine Coast Lightning with their teammate Geva Mentor, a core player on the triumphant English team. The Lightning arranged a number of team celebrations for Mentor. Bassett was so down she couldn’t attend them.
The Lightning’s first match brought another loss. Bassett was frustrated after the game and found Wood crying in a tunnel beneath the stands of Sydney’s cavernous Qudos Bank Arena. “She was bawling her eyes out. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she said, ‘It’s not fun’.”
Bassett agreed. The problem wasn’t that losing wasn’t fun — she’d experienced plenty of rough seasons as a young player in Perth, traditionally Australia’s weakest netball city. The problem was that netball wasn’t fun any more. The Commonwealth Games loss still weighed heavily on the captain. “How can I play in a competition when I’m so down on confidence?” she wondered.
Bassett, who stands 196cm tall, is regarded as one of the world’s best shooters. A loss of confidence can cripple any sportsperson, but when you’re the player responsible for scoring the goals it can be devastating. Enter Noeline Taurua, the widely admired Kiwi who coaches the Lightning. A mother of five and daughter of a renowned Maori elder, her quirky but demanding coaching style was the main reason Bassett left Perth for the Sunshine Coast in 2017. When the shooter started to describe her burnout, the response was classic “Noels”. Netball, she explained, is like sex. Sometimes you only realise how much you like it after you’ve done it. So you give it a go, you do it, and then you want to do it again.
So Bassett stuck to the doing and pretty soon the Lightning were on a winning streak, eventually making the grand final in Perth against West Coast Fever — the club where Bassett started her career. Perth led by three goals at half time. Then Bassett decided it was time to win. “I thought, s..t, well I’ve got to make something good happen out of this year. I had Steph [Wood] with me in the circle and I just wanted… I really just wanted to do it for her. It had been heartbreaking at Comm Games, and I wanted to give us something that made us happy.” And while she was at it, she decided, she’d stake her claim for the match’s most valuable player award. “F..k this,’ she thought. “I’m gonna win MVP”.
Bassett shot 26 goals in the second half, guiding the Lightning to a second Super Netball premiership. And she won that MVP award.
When we first speak, in early February, Bassett is trying to relax before the start of a fresh season. She’s a guarded character who rattles off answers in rapid, clipped sentences. There’s little of the easy banter that athletes sometimes lean on to get through an interview. But she’s curious, and often jumps in with her own questions. Less small talk, more big ideas. (Alexander describes her captain as a deep thinker who sometimes surprises her coaches with her encyclopaedic knowledge of the game.) With the benefit of time, Bassett has become philosophical about that Commonwealth Games final. “Last year was really extremely hard,” she says. “When I look back… I’m impressed with myself for getting through it at times.”
She’ll pull on the green and gold next week in Liverpool, England, for that World Cup competition Alexander told her to focus on during the bleak poolside meeting more than 12 months ago. She’ll captain the team once again, and she’s learnt that no matter how well your team has played, those big matches, and ultimately those big tournaments, are won in the dying minutes. “When I see photos from [the Commonwealth Games final], we all look shell-shocked. And I think that’s because we didn’t realise how important those last few minutes were.”
Ultimately, Bassett says, England just wanted it more. But the Poms won’t be able to claim that mantle again this year.
When Bassett began playing 15 years ago, Australia’s best netballers were still required to buy their own tape to strap sore ankles or knees. Salaries are growing steadily, and with a minimum wage in Super Netball now at $30,000, the long-dreamt-of era when netball players can solely focus on their sport is within reach. But Bassett’s code is also fighting for attention in an increasingly crowded space as cricket and football codes pour millions into their women’s divisions.
Bassett can still remember the controversial PR guru Max Markson saying that if netball wanted more attention, the players should pose for a nude calendar. The truth is that in an era when kids around Australia are talking about the feats of AFLW’s Tayla Harris or soccer’s Sam Kerr, characters are thin on the ground in netball.
The previous Diamonds captain, Sharni Layton, was loved for her larrikin nature and boisterous on-court antics. Netball fans had grown accustomed to a leader who fires up the troops at half time, leading from the front with heroic big plays. But shooters need to keep their emotions in check. Bassett is unconventional as an Australian captain. Consistent. Focused. Quiet. Some would say aloof. She wins games with accuracy, carving out marginal advantages on the score sheet through reliability. Taurua describes it as an unorthodox way of playing the position; even close observers often simply don’t understand what she’s doing on court.
Everyone who has coached Bassett agrees she’s the definition of a big-game player. But she’s far less flattering in her own assessment of her game. “I would say I’m quite a boring player in the fact that I catch the ball, shoot, and smile. I’m pretty low key out there on court, which people assume is lazy, because I’m not running around geeing people up or high-five-ing the crap out of everyone. I know some of the comments about me being captain of the Diamonds. People are confused, they don’t think I’m particularly inspiring or a great leader out on court.”
Nevertheless, she has been voted captain by her teammates multiple times (that’s how it’s done at the Diamonds these days). She has formed strong bonds with her teammates in ways the public doesn’t see. Alexander says Bassett, as captain, does “the off-court stuff” very well, reinforcing relationships and providing affirmation for her teammates. “We don’t want cookie‑cutter Australian Diamonds,” Alexander says. In the past, she explains, our national netballers have been cast from a narrower mould. There is a conservative streak that runs through the sport, and a traditional unwillingness to accommodate those who don’t play the part. Sharni Layton rocked the boat in very visible ways, but Bassett’s style has upset traditionalists too.
The thing with Bassett is that even netball’s most diehard fans have no idea about half the things she does as a player. Earlier this year she visited a “talls camp” convened by Netball Australia to identify the next crop of stars. Bassett told the young players how hard she found it as a 16-year-old who was asked to play elite netball against grown women, and the kind of work she had to put in to progress her career. Taurua says Bassett has also played a key role in the success of young shooter Cara Koenen, who is shaping up as a Diamond in the making. None of these things, though, has been spruiked by Bassett. With almost 50,000 followers on Instagram, it wouldn’t be hard for her to spread the word, boost her image. But she’s just simply not interested in any recognition for her behind-the-scenes work.
“You know what? I don’t care. And it’s taken me a very long time to get to this stage,” she says. “As captain it’s the behind-the-scenes work and the connections I have with others around me that inspires me. And I hope it inspires others that they can be authentic to what they want to achieve.”
She describes herself as an “extroverted introvert”. As a child she’d prefer reading a book alone in her room on school holidays to going out and socialising. But netball has constantly forced her to play the part of an extrovert, to communicate more, be part of a team, be a captain. “It’s kind of like being caught between what I am comfortable with and who I am, and what others want me to be and what I need to be for my sport,” she says.
As a child, Bassett didn’t show a natural affinity for team sports, instead focusing on horse-riding and music. She’s always been tall, though: she cleared 180cm before she even reached high school, making her a target for bullying. She towered over her peers but wanted nothing more than to fit in. The experience left her with body issues, which she dealt with by hiding inside baggy hand-me-downs from a male cousin.
Then a primary school teacher tossed her a lifeline by recruiting the 11-year-old for the school’s netball team. Suddenly she could put her height to good use and she threw herself into the sport, spending long nights shooting with her older sister on a makeshift goalpost in the family’s back yard. Her sister would eventually get bored and wander off, but Caitlin would stick with it until dark.
Away from the court, Bassett was known as a bright kid with a knack for overachieving. She would go on to earn a music scholarship after Year 10 at the selective Perth Modern School. To do so she only needed to play one instrument, but she learnt both the saxophone and clarinet.
But her fastest rise came through the ranks of Perth’s netball scene. Five years after picking up a netball for the first time, she debuted for the Perth Orioles at the age of 16, matched up against the then Diamonds captain Liz Ellis. Tall shooters are famously slow to develop at netball’s highest level. All of a sudden, girls who were able to rely on simply being taller than everyone else have to deal with crafty, physical defenders.
Bassett was reluctant at first to embrace the kind of weight training that would help her withstand the elbows, hips, shoulders and shoves she received from far older opponents on a weekly basis. It wasn’t that she resented the work; she just struggled to gain the confidence to strengthen a body she still didn’t like living in.
“I always felt that Caitlin was someone who strived to get better,” says Michelle Wilkins, who mentored Bassett from the age of 15 at the Western Australian Institute of Sport. “She worked hard at self-confidence. It’s probably an area people don’t understand. It takes a lot of hard work, particularly from our tall young girls. Caitlin really took the initiative to grow herself as a person so that she could be who she is today.”
Bassett made her Diamonds debut at 20 in a match against England. By 23, she had established herself as a fixture in the team, where she has remained for the past eight years.
Next week, the Diamonds will begin their quest for redemption at the World Cup. It’s a narrative they’ve tried to duck since the Commonwealth Games — after all, you can’t have a redemption without failure, and the team has refused to label their silver medals as a failure out of respect to their English opponents. But there is a very real rivalry at play now, and a fire burning in the Australian players. Last year’s gold medal has buoyed the English Roses and they’re tipped to repeat the feat on home soil. That has rankled the Diamonds, who still top the world rankings.
It took Bassett six months before she could watch that final again. She forced herself to do it before a test match against the Roses in September. “I always knew it was going to be hard watching that video, but I had to do it in order to not repeat that same mistake,” she says.
Bassett is now 31, and has played 90 matches for Australia. By the end of the World Cup she should rank fifth on the list of most-capped players. Although she clearly wants to continue, this might be her last major tournament with the Diamonds. It’s her big chance, then, to expunge the memories of last year — and to do it her own way. How does she feel heading into the tournament? She answers like a true warrior: “I can’t wait.”