Super Netball 2022: Covid plan outlined for new season

Netball played its entire 2020 season in a hub before having to move players and officials through hubs in three states last year while outrunning lockdowns and Covid outbreaks around the country.

A home-and-away fixture is set for the season but a Covid outbreak that affected more than a dozen players and staff at the Queensland Firebirds last week, causing the club to postpone pre-season clashes against the Collingwood Magpies, shows the issue is far from over.

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Netball Australia chief executive Kelly Ryan said the organisation recognised the challenges that would need to be overcome to return to a “normal” season in an environment still dominated by Covid.

But every effort was being made for that to happen within the restrictions Covid has and will force on professional sport.

Running the past two seasons in a hub has come at an enormous cost for netball, which has lost millions while managing to deliver full fixtures and remain the highest-paid domestic professional sport for women.

But Ryan said cost was not the main issue.

“It’s not even the financial impost now, I think it’s more the mental impost and the time impost,” she said.

“We obviously have a lot of athletes that have other jobs and education and study and all those types of things that happen in their lives and they’ve had to put that on hold for the last two years.

“We will plan for that (hub) scenario but we want it to be the absolute last resort for us as a plan this year just to try and allow all of our athletes and umpires and staff to try and have some sort of normal life that enables them to go about their day to day work and responsibilities as best as they possibly can.

“We certainly don’t want to have to consider the financial burden that that would put the industry under if we had to go down another path of hubs and bubbles and really rigid processes (either).

“I really would love to think that we can avoid that.”

Planning is a massive part of that and no option is off the table, including squad sizes.

Clubs and the league rejected the option of rookie contracts in recent collective player agreement talks, leaving teams with just 10 players – plus up to six training partners, part-timers on $5000 honorariums.

With seven players on the court at any one time, any outbreak would hit hard but Ryan revealed squad numbers were also under the spotlight in Covid discussions.

“That is one of our considerations at the moment. The benefit of where we sit today is we don’t have to make any hard fast decisions at this moment,” Ryan said.

“We’ve obviously got Team Girls Cup (pre-season competition) which comes up in a couple of weeks time so we will be trialling a couple of initiatives for that particular event.

“But we’ve still got another month post that before the (Super Netball) season actually starts and a month in a Covid environment is a long time.

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“All we can really do at this particular point is plan for multiple scenarios that we think could potentially take place across the season and have mitigation measures against each of those, noting that if scenario A happens we know what the response to Scenario A is.

“And we have scenarios that are from “A”, at the moment through to about “F” in terms of what could potentially happen across the season.

“But our full intent is to get all 60 games away in the best possible fashion that we absolutely can.”

Originally published as Super Netball 2022: Covid plan outlined for new season